I’m doing quite a lot of software quality audits lately. Some customers want to know what the quality is of a product that was developed off-shore. Some just want to know how long they should keep developing the current version or if they should start developing a new version in a new environment. Often products that have been around for long have architectures that are not kept into shape. Or new requirements that just won’t fit into the current architecture. Of requirements that are just too hard to do in the current environment, for example communicating with advanced webservices that require certificates, SSL, custom authentication or reliable sessions. For products developed with for example VB6, this is just extremely time-consuming to develop. While this is plain easy in WCF.

Anyway, whatever the reason is that customers have to request an quality audit, I always first explain to them the difference between what I call the external and internal quality of a software product.

• External quality
  This is the quality of the product that is perceived by the users of the product. This includes the stability of the product, the ease of use of it, the interaction design and the way it conforms to the requirements
• Internal quality
  This is the quality of the source code, the quality of the architecture, the quality of the development process around the product, etc. Anything that is not perceivable by the users of the software.

We at Oosterkamp training | consultancy are specialized in auditing the internal quality of software. We have developed our own techniques for quickly and accurately determining the internal quality of software. For example, we look at how clean the code is. We also inspect software for possible defects in software using IfSQ. We look at the architecture of the software, the consistency of used solutions, etc., etc.

Call us if you’re interested in an audit or are interested in reviews of audits we did for our customers.