The managing director of a growing software company reached out to Boncode with a familiar problem: despite strong market potential, his team was spending nearly 80% of its time on maintenance and bug fixes. Innovation had stalled. New features moved slowly. Engineers hesitated to touch large parts of the codebase.
Boncode’s initial assessment revealed a surprising truth. The code was not fundamentally broken. It worked, but it was hard to understand. Structures were unclear, modules were poorly-named, and navigating the system felt risky, especially for new hires. The result was fear-driven development. Engineers avoided change because they could not confidently predict what might break next. Our recommendation was simple: make the code easier to analyze.
From assessment to action
Rather than treating code quality as a one-off initiative, Boncode introduced continuous measurement. The codebase was analyzed weekly. Reports were shared with the engineering team and quarterly summaries presented to leadership. Progress became visible. Refactoring focused on structure, naming, and logical organization rather than rewriting core functionality.
During this period, the original tech lead left, and a new leader stepped in. A few sprints later, something remarkable happened. In a quarterly meeting, the new tech lead announced that the team had completed multiple iterations without introducing a single bug.
For Jan Willem Klerkx, CEO of Boncode, this moment was profound. “People say there’s no such thing as bug-free software,” he says. “Yet, here was a customer who had gone from spending 80% of their time on maintenance to running sprints with no bugs at all.”
‘Analyzability’ builds developer confidence
While it resulted in a highly-maintainable codebase, our work wasn’t directly centered on eliminating defects: it had focused on making the code easier to analyze.
Jan Willem spotted a deeper pattern. When people repair physical systems, whether a bike, a car, or a home, confidence grows from understanding how things work. Without that understanding, hesitation takes over. The same applies to software.
Engineers who cannot easily reason about a system do not experiment. They avoid refactoring. They fear unintended consequences. Bugs linger – not because they are impossible to fix – but because no-one feels confident enough to touch them for fear of breaking something.
“The key is understandability,” Jan Willem explains. “If you don’t know how something physical works – like a car engine – you have zero confidence in fixing it. The same goes for code. If people understand what they’re touching, they feel empowered to improve it.”
Analyzable code makes that possible. Clear structure, meaningful naming, and low complexity allow developers to trace behavior, estimate impact, and locate faults quickly. It transforms fear into confidence.
Maintainability is the outcome, not the aim
ISO IEC 25010 defines analyzability as a core element of maintainability. It describes how easily software can be understood, inspected, and diagnosed. The standard does not prescribe how to write code: it defines the outcome. The key takeaway?Software should be easy to analyze.
Jan Willem frames this as a shift in mindset. “Maintainability is not the goal,” he says. “Maintainability is the consequence of better analyzability.” In the customer’s case, no radical rewrites were required. The team improved structure and clarity. As the code became easier to understand, bugs became easier to fix. Eventually, they stopped appearing.
For software leaders, the lesson is simple: if you want faster delivery, safer change, and fewer defects, invest in analyzability. When code is easy to understand, everything else follows. If your teams hesitate to change code, ship slower than they should, or spend most of their time fixing bugs, poor analyzability is likely the root cause.
Contact Boncode to discover how readable your codebase is and how small structural changes can unlock faster delivery, higher confidence, and fewer defects.