Master your technical debt

Quality Control is the solution to master technical debt during the evolution of a software system. In addition to a tool-based identification of quality deficits it comprises a process which is successfully in operation at many professional software development organizations. It is the basis for an enduring improvement of software quality to ensure the system remains future-proof.

Maintainability

Protect the investments in your software

Technical debt means that organizations will be facing high maintenance costs in the long term if they neglect the technical or inner quality of the software. Symptoms are for example program code which is hard to understand or complex dependencies between components. In these cases, even simple functional changes can result in a huge development effort. 

An active management of the inner quality is needed to prevent an accumulation of technical debt. Otherwise, there is a high risk of finally losing the entire investment in the developed software as it becomes unmaintainable. 

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Tool: Teamscale

Identifying quality deficits

Specific quality deficits can only be dealt with if they are visible. Our software intelligence suite Teamscale provides meaningful analyses to detect technical debt and to measure it. In addition, it also provides the tool support to run an effective quality-control process.

Visit www.teamscale.com for a detailed overview of Teamscale. 

Process: Quality Control

From monitoring to improving

Analyzing and monitoring the software quality alone will not result in an improvement. When developing from scratch, it might be possible to just fix any quality defect right away and keep the code base clean. However, most software development is done in grown code bases and there is typically no way to get rid of what could turn out to be a huge number of quality deficits which might have existed for years. Having said that, it is the wrong strategy to put up with it and not take any action. Things will get worse if you don't act. One way of coping with this and a key success factor in quality control is to focus on current code changes. This allows you to apply, for example, the boy scout rule "leave the code cleaner than it used to be". This is also practical in grown code bases und will result in stepwise improvement .

Success factors for Quality Control

These are the key factors for a successful adoption of the quality-control process within software development organizations

Case studies

Customers benefiting from a software quality assessment

Static Code Analysis

The SI Digital Grid department of Siemens AG develops the product Spectrum Power 7, a grid control system for controlling power grids in the medium-voltage and high-voltage range worldwide. The code base comprises over 10 million lines of code and has been developed in parts for over 20 years. It consists mainly of a mix of C/C++, Java, Python and Fortran and is distributed over 23 Git repositories.

The more than 170 developers of the system in 5 time zones are organised in 17 scrum teams, work with 3 different development environments (Eclipse, MS Visual Studio, QtCreator) and maintain builds for 2 operating systems.

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How can we help you with managing your technical debt and improve your software quality? Get in touch with me, I am happy to assist.

Dr. Tobias Röhm leads the quality control services team and has many years of experience in software quality control. 

Contact him now!