What are the ways to create an advanced software system? There are many aspects, but quality assessment is one that is critically important. No matter your role: a manager, user, client, investor, or developer — assessing a software product is a core step in reaching its top-notch quality.
Assume you have defined timeframes, budget, and a desire to build a reliable and scalable application. As a project manager or a product owner, the challenge you face is to reduce costs, drive revenue, and as a result, transform your business. Here comes technical debt as a significant barrier to your way of addressing those challenges.
Why Is It Important to Reduce Technical Debt?
Achieving short-term effect utilizing temporary easy-to-implement solutions affects the software quality in the long run. Technical debt can slow down the development of your IT solution in the future. Besides, low quality code, security issues, and suboptimal performance are just several examples of ways technical debt may impact your business.
Is There a Strategy for Effective Technical Debt Reduction?
Fighting the shortcomings of technical debt can be handled by an in-depth audit and assessment of a software product. Evaluating code efficiency, assessing technical debts, and ensuring compliance with industry standards are tasks performed with TETRA™, Technical Debt Reduction Platform.
TETRA™ is an exclusive set of tools and techniques to assess the quality levels of software systems and products. It helps measure the quality from both business and technical sides. It is an effective strategy to implement the “technology-right” software processes in your organization to improve time-to-market and increase the proficiency of your developers.
Let’s explore two case studies where project managers prove that seeing your product from the inside is worth a shot.
Running TETRA™ Multiple Times Proves the Effectiveness of Improvements
The award-winning lens manufacturer, leading a 7+ years cooperation with Intetics, aimed to improve a Healthcare and Life Sciences desktop application used by opticians to customize and order ophthalmic spectacle lenses.
The challenge was to migrate the app to the new system without disrupting operations and provide compatibility with peripheral optical devices.
One of the project stages involved the app’s evaluation — that is where TETRA™ came in handy.
The first range of TETRA™ assessment implied the two steps:
- the source code quality check using static code analyzer SonarQube
- dedicated security engineer performed the security assessment via several penetration tests
As a result, the client received a detailed report on risk levels during the testing. The report involved recommendations on improving code quality and security.
The secure end system allowed the opticians a faster and better ordering experience and automated e-mail communications with patients. The order error rate was reduced by 75%, and on-time order delivery improved by 8-9%.
The client was satisfied and requested the next rounds of testing within the TETRA™ assessment.
Tetra™ Insured Clients’ Risk Mitigation and Predictable Development of the Project before the Launch.
One of our clients decided to outsource the application development for the first time. The project required an advanced level of security and sufficient source code quality. Those were the central measures for ensuring a smooth handover process and code extensibility in the future.
The most crucial aspect was providing transparency in development, especially in security. So as the client could see all security risks to eliminate before the application enters the market.
We measured the source code quality using the static code analyzer SonarQube. The security was assessed by conducting several penetration tests involving a dedicated security engineer.
Here are the key take-outs revealed after the TETRA™ application:
- Highly maintainable and reliable source code, achieving the highest grade.
- Thousands of lines of web app code contain less than 1% duplicates.
- The technical debt is estimated as half working day to fix.
In addition, the automated analysis revealed zero security vulnerabilities. However, the security engineer found seven potential vulnerabilities with various levels of severity.
The penetration testing report contained the detailed reproduction steps, severity estimate, and instructions on improving security. For example, one of the issues was a slightly different text message to the existing and non-existent users in the ‘reset password’ functionality. We unified this message before the project went live.
As a result, the client got a secure, maintainable, and extendable application within the estimated timeframes and budget.
Wondering how to avoid technical debt in your project? Try TETRA™ for your software application right away!
Featured TETRA™ Case Studies
Technical Debt Reduction Service TETRA Helps E-Learning Company Save 22% of Redevelopment Costs
Read More about TETRA™ on Medium
