Checking Code Quality

Most organizations have started to realize that code quality is an important root cause to many of their issues, whether it’s incident levels or time to value. The growing complexity of development environments in IT -- the outsourcing, the required velocity, the introduction of Agile -- have all raised the issue about code quality, sometimes to an executive level.

Business applications have always been complex. You can go back to the 70s, even the 60s, and hear about systems that have millions of lines of code. But here’s the rub: In those days it was millions of lines of COBOL or some other language. But it was all one language. All one system. All one single application in a nice, neat, tidy package.

Today, millions of lines of code means

So, when we examine code quality we’ll have to think of it in two stages. First is basic code quality, which measures individual or small collections of coded components written in a single language or occupying a single tier in an application. The second is application quality, which analyzes the software across all of the application’s languages, tiers, and technologies to measure how well all of the app’s components come together to create operational performance and overall maintainability.

We would be the first to shout that code quality is important, but high quality code by itself will not ensure a high quality application. Checking code quality can be as simple as running your thumb through the code; however, application quality problems are difficult to detect until components have been integrated with components from other tiers in the build process. This means they’re often detected at the last stage of integration testing, causing delays, frustration, and potentially, business

An evaluation of application quality, rather than code quality, can detect these problems.

So how do I assess application quality?

There are many tools available that measure code quality. They’ve been available for many years and increasingly becoming standard components in developers’ tool sets. However, when it comes to application quality, it’s only in recent years that some tools have been introduced by various software vendors and consultancies. Indeed, organizations need the help of application quality diagnostic services because this is not something that can be done only manually, given the scope of the complexity of modern development tools.

The good news is, when organizations do start analyzing their IT systems for application quality, they will gain a variety of benefits:

Visibility across application(s). Better manage the portfolio of applications and projects with the metrics from consistent and continuous analysis of all core business