Software quality

It is a matter of verifying that all required technical documentation and procedures are available with the deposit enabling any proficient engineer to recover the main ideas of the IT patrimony and so the maintenance in reasonable conditions and time. It concerns:

• First of all, the original or current developers if they have to work on a previous version for any reason.
• New engineers, trainees or temporary workers who must be efficient as soon as possible when disturbing the existing team as little as possible.
• To the end it also concerns new development teams who will be responsible for the maintenance and support , new development as for example within a takeover or patrimony transfer.

Remark : It is not to question the existing internal development methods and choices to manage that patrimony. Obviously they are part of that patrimony. The job is to check they are written somewhere and enforced.

Among these documentation LOGITAS will look for existing and accuracy of:

• Detailed description of the development and packaging environment as well as the relevant installation procedure which must be clear enough for a new engineer to be able to install its own development environment by himself,
• Architecture document and any documentation enabling to recover the ideas and organization of the software,
• Internal development methods and particularly documentation, files, pages or class naming rules. These rules which are imposed by the increasing number of files (JAVA classes, PHP pages, API, stored procedures) are often verbal and uncertainly respected. An engineer will so may prefer write a new class or page rather than to ferret for days in the hundred of existing files leading to redundant and dead code, making the build procedures heavier, having files with the same name and different content and location at different level in the tree, increasing the maintenance expense; overloading the computers and the backup, etc. It is either difficult to go through efficient code review without written procedures,
• Building procedures, documented and available scripts,
• Source code manager even if internal tool,
• Technical documentation management. The documentation is often widely spread in the trees and some time even the owner cannot get it back. A same documentation may exist on different computer with the same name but different update level, with no creation or last update dating, etc. How could engineers rely on such documentation,
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