The Lebensversicherung von 1871 a. G. München insurance company specialises in innovative permanent disability insurance, life insurance and pension insurance.

LV 1871 develops its central applications in-house based on agile development methods. These include several Java systems, one COBOL system and a variety of proprietary archive and print system extensions.

In light of this diverse application landscape, which is common for insurance companies, LV 1871 is interested in a comprehensive overview of the quality of its application portfolio.

We analyse LV 1871’s central systems using established automated static analyses and manual code reviews.

The code quality of each single system is assessed regarding different aspects, such as structure, redundancy, documentation and common error patterns. In doing so, we do not only examine the current state of their systems but also show quality trends of previous years based on a repository analysis.

We summarise our results in the form of detailed written reports and discuss them with the development teams. Based on this, in cooperation with LV 1871, we identify useful improvement measures and help the teams to apply them.

LV 1871 knows the strengths and weaknesses in detail of each inspected system. The company is aware of where the systems stand regarding code quality and how they have evolved to get to that stage. Therefore it will not experience any unpleasant surprises.

Based on the gained knowledge, LV 1871 can derive improvement measures in a targeted way as well as distribute resources and skills as needed across all systems.

In addition, the thorough examination of code quality makes the project’s participants more aware of code quality and thus contributes to a sustainable improvement.