How To Build Better Quality Software Through Assessment And Monitoring

by | Aug 29, 2023

B O N C O D E   B L O G

High-quality software enables companies to hit their strategic business goals and provide value to multiple stakeholders – from investors to end-users. Well-maintained software is much easier to improve, so eliminating vulnerabilities is more straightforward. In fact, these are the keys that unlock better quality software – maintainability and security. 

Most companies already know this. Their challenge is how to obtain the independent facts and insights necessary to improve the technical quality of their software. Here at BonCode we have two solutions: software assessment and software monitoring. 

Software Assessment 

When you as a company have research questions about the future-readiness of your software or your overall application landscape, you need answers about software quality. This is often driven by the need for improvement, such as frequent outages, low development productivity, or a lack of technical expertise.  

Understanding the quality of your software is crucial for certain business decisions, including whether to discontinue a product or put resources into maintaining it. You might also need to determine cloud-readiness. A thorough software assessment can also provide total transparency for investors who are looking to put their money into your product and need assurances around software quality.  

Software assessment from BonCode is a one-time service that uses automated code review technology to gather facts and insights about the quality of your software. Our assessment begins with a kickoff meeting, and we always validate our findings with your technical team first to create buy-in with the final results. This also helps to surface things like quick wins or known issues. We deliver our independent findings and recommendations to your team in a way that can be understood at every level, bridging your entire organization from your technical team to the C-suite. 

Our assessment delivers findings, recommendations, and risks visualized in a customizable dashboard. Take duplications, for example. Whenever such a piece of code needs maintenance, this needs to be done on all duplicates  – a time-consuming task that’s wide open to human error. What would happen if one instance is missed? When duplicated code is replaced by a single source of truth, it only needs to be changed once, and every instance is updated. This saves time and prevents potential errors.     

Software Monitoring

One of the key challenges of maintaining and improving software quality is knowing exactly where to direct your resources to optimize their impact. Often, this decision-making is based on previous experience or a gut feeling, which can be highly unreliable. 

Instead of making software-related business decisions based on generalized assumptions, our continuous software monitoring empowers you to make data-driven decisions based on independent facts. Software monitoring is an ongoing process that helps software companies track trends over time. Think of it as a continuous health check that takes place once per sprint. Or see it as taking lap times whilst racing. 

By shining a light on technical quality, software monitoring makes it easy for people at every level to stay informed. And since monitoring takes place during development of the software, potential flaws are discovered early, leaving enough time to steer towards solutions. 

Within your organization, different roles need data on software quality visualized in a way that’s relevant to them. That’s why the findings of our automated code analysis are categorized with risk profiles – low, medium, and high. Not only that, we also provide periodic reporting, giving management a clear and ongoing picture of risks to quality. 

Portfolio dashboards enable leaders and other stakeholders to have a fact-based discussion around quality. This is especially useful when companies outsource their development to different vendors, and they need oversight and control of consistent quality across different teams and different technologies.  

Source-Code Analytics 

If you’ve ever experienced the impact of low-quality, custom-made software, then you know how crucial software quality is to the success of a business. If business-critical software fails, the business fails. 

Through our two main approaches – software assessment and software monitoring – source code analysis from BonCode can help you improve the quality of your software, surfacing independent facts about your code that support data-driven decision-making. 

Discover more about source-code analytics and our two approaches to software quality. Contact us

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