Who could possibly better judge the quality of our code than ourselves? We wrote this code. We are the experts. So why should we invest in a professional code quality audit? Let me give you a few reasons why it is a worthwhile investment.

Quality control has many facets, but if there is one factor that distinguishes

good from high-end quality control, it is the systematic use of

manual code reviews. While a lot can be achieved by tool-supported analyses and

improvements, manual reviews have some unique benefits.

At least not all of them at once. The awareness of quality deficits (these include bugs, lack of understandability, missing documentation, a lack of tests, and so on) seems to follow a sinus-curve like shape.

In those phases with the highest awareness, project managers and their developer teams often decide to dedicate a larger block of time exclusively to cleaning up the system and putting everything else on hold. All too often, the ambitious objective is to remove all quality deficits—in many cases without even specifying what a relevant quality deficit is.

Don’t do this!

During our daily work as consultants for software quality, as auditors of different kinds of software systems and in our role as quality engineers in software engineering projects, we have the opportunity to see a large variety of software development organizations. We encounter a huge amount of different systems from different domains, written in different languages and using various technologies. But most importantly, we talk to many many people that face the challenge of developing and maintaining software day by day. As a result, we receive a big treasure of experiences, insights, anecdotes and war stories on how to (and how better not to) develop software.