Quality Control

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.

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

Immediate feedback

Fast, easy and focused analysis results for developers

It is not easy to improve the code again when analysis results are delayed, e.g. if the build must finish first. That's why Teamscale's incremental analysis engine works in a change-driven way. New findings are shown within seconds for all repository branches, allowing problems to be fixed immediately during development.

Quality gate integration

Not clean means not finished

Code quality must be part of the Definition of Done. To make sure quality is right, ideally a code review process should be in place. This is why Teamscale integrates with collaboration platforms, like GitLab, GitHub or Bitbucket or with the SAP transport tools to support the reviewer in his/her decision whether to accept or deny a change.

Feasible goals

Practical and realistic expectations

"But - we don't have the time to clean-up the code ..." - No, you probably have the wrong goal in mind. It's important to specify a realistic one. At the very least, you should be able not to make it worse, and even improve it gradually. To achieve this you need the right tool and the right quality control process.

Communicate!

Bring the topic to the team

Quality must be actively communicated within the team, e.g. by regular retrospectives. This is where you work on your common quality goal and discuss quality tasks. The goal is to build a common attitude to quality aspects. Quality reports to management and/or customer are proof of transparency and trust between all parties.

Case studies

Customers benefiting from a software quality assessment

Siemens

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.

We are here to help

Our favorite packages when it comes to empowering your organization so that you can successfully master technical debt.

Quality Control Incubation

You are not sure if and how quality control would work in your company? We will define a quality-control process suitable for your needs, state recommendations on quality goals and hand over a configured Teamscale evaluation instance.

Get a quote

Contact the Quality Control Services Team

Our philosophy

Learn more about how to get software quality under control

Daniela Steidl

Does Quality Control Really Make Your Code Better?

We believe that a continuous quality control process is necessary to have a long-term, measurable impact. However, does this quality control actually have an long-term impact in practice? Or are feature and change requests still receiving more priorities than cleaning up code that was written in a hurry and under time pressure? With our long-term partner Munich Re, we gathered enough data to show in a large-scale industry case study that quality control can improve the code quality ...

Nils Göde

Don't Fix All Your Quality Deficits

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! ...

Corneliu Popeea

Monthly assessments: How often to inspect the code quality in a code quality control process?

A code quality control process must not be solely based on automated tools, rather it should combine tool-based analysis with a certain amount of human interaction. There are endless variations of how a code quality control process can be implemented. In this blog-post I’d like to give a few insights on how regular code assessments, named here monthly assessments, can lead to a feedback loop that improves the code quality control process. ...

Christian Pfaller

Quality Tasks and Quality Goals

Quality Control is one of the major services we do at CQSE. The aim of quality control is to stay (almost) clean of quality deficits or to achieve a continuous improvement regarding quality. I will focus on two aspects of this process: Quality tasks and how these relate to quality goals. Often, when we are in the role of a quality engineer and apply the quality control process, the most effort goes into the definition of quality tasks. ...

Visit our blog

Get A Quote

Would you like to get in touch?

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!