Software Analysis

What should I know about Technical Debt?

Developing a software is a "never-ending story". The need for updates or extensions is present throughout the entire software lifecycle. In that process, new technical debts always arise. If they are not routinely reduced, the maintenance effort rises far above the critical mark of 20% of the total development capacity. The value is an indicator that the team is increasingly busy with the negative effects of the debts instead of developing new features.

How to locate and quantify the technical debt in code and architecture in order to take effective countermeasures in time?

It is important to know:

• Not every technical debt is a pressing problem.
• Not every critical technical debt is easy to identify.
• Technical debt in the software architecture can be particularly problematic.

In order to meet the recommended budget of 20% development capacity for maintenance and debt reduction, critical debt should be kept always in mind during development. But the question remains - how do I identify debt and how can I then prioritise the really critical debts in the countermeasures to make the most efficient use of the always scarce development capacity?

Is it possible to analyse software quality in an automated way?

Cape of Good Code has developed the DETANGLE® software suite for the analysis of the software code and architecture.

The unique feature of the DETANGLE® platform is that not only the established code quality tools can be integrated to support identification of technical debt in the code, but additionally the debt in the software architecture can also be evaluated due to our highly innovative algorithms. Thus, for the first time in software analysis, technical debt gets analysed both in the code and in the architecture.

The algorithms also allow the impact of different technical development procedures to be quantified and correlated with the maintenance and additional costs in the development. New and more specific KPIs allow monitoring of trends in the most critical debts. This significantly improves the control and sustainability of debt reduction measures.

The Cape of Good Code Software Analysis with DETANGLE® includes the following services:

• Localisation of Technical Debt in the code and architecture.
• Checking the efficiency of the technical development processes (such as testing, review activities) and the completeness of the documentation.
• Forecasting the impact on maintenance costs and on the future extensibility of the software.
• Prioritise the measures to reduce the debt with effort-vs-benefit criteria.
• Tracing the technical debts to their actual technical causes (e.g. architecture or code quality as well as quality of the development processes). 

We support the stakeholders in software development with professional analyses to keep the maintenance effort in the lifecycle of the software within a reasonable corridor of change and stability. The DETANGLE® Classic Analysis provides all needed data for code restructuring in order to reduce the technical debt in the software to a non-critical level in a targeted and effective manner. In the DETANGLE® Pro version, the system even makes automatic suggestions for restructuring solutions to architects and developers.

Based on the results of the analysis with the DETANGLE® Analysis Suite and supported by information and details from interviews and documents, many useful insights support all stakeholders in your software development process.

Findings for the stakeholders

What fields of investigation does our software analysis cover?

Cape of Good Code provides services and analysis by developers for developers. We understand from our own experience the underlying conditions in software development. This is exactly why we have developed DETANGLE®. We offer the three service packages "Health Check", "Improvement" and "Restructuring", which differ in the scope of the analysis fields and methods (such as the DETANGLE® Classic or DETANGLE® Pro version, interviews and consulting).

Our analyses and proposals are characterised by a high level of analytical depth, but also by pragmatism and implementability. And the effort required for our analysis of your software is less than you probably would expect.

What's next after the software analysis?

According to the scope and risk potential of the quality issues, an improvement project should be initiated timely. It is essential that enough capacity of qualified developers is made available for this task. We recommend adding a dedicated workstream for organisational measures to the project, to keep the future build-up of technical weaknesses (e.g. Technical Debt) under control.  

In your software quality improvement project, Cape of Good Code can support by implementing the results and recommendations of the analysis. The DETANGLE® Pro version is used for automated refactoring suggestions to evaluate different options together with the developers. Initial experience shows that this can save up to 50% of the time needed to develop a solution.

In detail, Cape of Good Code offers the following services:

• Management of the project to ensure consistent implementation of the recommendations.
• Recording of refactoring measures as issues including description and rationale.
• Training of the development teams on best practices in dealing with issue trackers and code repositories.
• Train the development teams on best practices for designing code for testability.
• Conceptual advice if a major transformation of the code architecture is required.

We also support the regular execution of these analyses, i.e. at least once per release.

This way, the effect of the measures is proven and new negative trends are identified and limited at an early stage. In this way, even after the initial and extensive software analysis, it is possible to keep the ever-present technical debt under control in the long term.