SourceInventory - Business Aspects

Just like people, software ages! Its quality is continuously decreasing because of the never-ending changes made in the code. The decay is general and inevitable. To slow down the process proper tools and methodologies aiding software quality assurance are to be used.

Quality is never an accident!

Have you ever felt that…

• The source code controls you and not vice versa?
• Adding new features is getting more and more expensive?
• The code is hard to maintain?
• The code is full of bugs and error prone constructs?
• Post-release defects are ruining your reputation?

The SourceInventory framework is the right solution for ICT leaders and project managers caring about software quality. The framework continuously monitors the quality of the central codebase by measuring and evaluating both its low and high-level quality attributes, like:

• source code metrics
  Software measurement is an essential element of management; there is little chance of controlling what we cannot measure. Software metrics are measures of some property of a piece of software, its source code or its specification. There are several aspects of measuring software attributes…
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• code duplications
  It is a common practice to reuse source code by simply copying and pasting its parts. Although this approach can reduce software development time, the price in the long-term must be paid in the form of increased maintainability costs. One of the primary concerns is that if the original code segment needs to be corrected, all the copied parts need to be checked and changed accordingly as well.
  Read more >> || Description of code duplications (PDF)
• so called "bad code smells"
  In computer programming, bad code smell is a symptom in the source code that possibly indicates a deeper problem, which can lead to a malfunctioning software.
  Read more >> || Description of bad smells (PDF)
• bugs, coding problems, bad practices and coding style
  Best practices provide guidelines for writing good, fast, maintainable, secure code. FrontEndART's products are capable of checking whether these best practices are being adhered to or not by developers. Besides these best practices, the tools can detect serious programming errors, which are either caused by unawareness or inadvertence of the developers. Read more >>
• external quality attributes

Source code metrics help you identifying the most critical hotspots in the code:

• The most complex parts
• Entities with the highest coupling factor
• Cohesion-related issues

Besides, metrics help in evaluating overall quality, estimating efforts and costs for the future.

Bad code smells are inefficient or error prone code constructs, that are potentially risky. They serve as an ideal starting point for code refactoring.

Code duplications (copy&paste source code fragments) are the main enemies of maintainability because all modifications and bugfixes must be repeated for every duplicate. Therefore they lead to:

• Inconsistently changing code parts
• Hardly maintainable code

SourceInventory finds all the duplicates, keeps track of them and helps evaluating and eliminating them.

The graphical dashboard of SourceInventory visualizes the results of the quality assessment, the changes in quality and the critical hotspots starting from the highest level down to the code itself.

The reporting engine generates summary reports for both managers and developers. Issuing automatic alerts makes immediate intervention possible when critical threshold values are exceeded, which shortens the maintenance period and therefore reduces costs.

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