What is a Software Audit

A Software Audit is the evaluation and investigation of a software system, its security and performance or the development process resulting in findings, conclusions and recommendations. These are communicated with the customer verbally, in written form or as a presentation.

On the basis of the findings and recommendations, the stakeholders get a snapshot view of the health of the system. As an analogy, the Software Audit is equivalent to a health check on an individual where post analysis the individual gets a set of reports and recommendations hence enabling him to lead a better life.

Why do you need a Software Audit

The chances of a software project failing are very high. Even though Agile methodologies have helped on improving the success ratio, however, there is a still a fair amount of chance that your project will fail if a Software Audit is not performed and/or action is not taken after the Software Audit.

The Standish Group's 2009 report shows a marked decrease in the success of software development

The Standish Group's just-released report, "CHAOS Summary 2009," "This year's results show a marked decrease in project success rates, with 32% of all projects succeeding which are delivered on time, on budget, with required features and functions" says Jim Johnson, chairman of The Standish Group, "44% were challenged which are late, over budget, and/or with less than the required features and functions and 24% failed which are cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used."

Apart from getting a high quality, robust product there are other benefits of doing a Software Audit which include

• Planning for improvements
• Finding gaps in the development process and taking corrective action
• Uncertainty reduction
• Risk containment by finding the risks associated with this code/technology/development process, understanding early warning signs that will show the risk & what should we do now?
• Tackling Risk
• Lowering the TCO of the system

Software Audit on time saves money, because expensive rework later on during the project will be avoided. In the long run discovering issues that occur with projects and finding solutions for these also helps to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. This increases the quality of the work done across projects and saves a lot of money too."

How can Inphina help?

Inphina can help you increase the overall quality of your projects and save money by providing four types of audit.

Each of these is tailored to a specific phase of a project. Together they cover the full project life cycle. Also, each of the audit types can be customized to your requirements. During a project one or more types of audit can be used to target specific areas of interest to you

The Specialist Generalist Approach

Inphina has a lot of experience implementing audits in large, complex environments based on J2EE, XML and integration technology. We use a specialist/generalist approach backed up by a QA consultant. The specialist focuses on the technical details of an audit (technology, code, check lists, best practices). The generalist focuses on the functional details (requirements, functionality, architecture, structure) and has overall responsibility for the audit. Generalist and specialist share the same technical background, making it possible to work efficiently and in support of each other. The QA consultant is an experienced auditor that can be consulted during the audit and executes peer reviews on audit deliverables.

Download the Inphina Audit Offering Sheet to get more insight into types, categories of Software Audits and the "Inphina Software Audit Approach".