Why You Should Consider a Technology / Codebase Audit
CEO / Co-Founder at JetRockets
Modern technology systems can be difficult to maintain, and tend to accumulate problems as they get older. It is wise to periodically address these problems by hiring a third party to audit your system.
The alternative is projects that burn cash, never get closer to completion, are riddled with bugs, and fail to complete requirements. They slow down your team and drag down your business with it. But getting an audit can help you identify the core problems holding you back, and allow your team to focus on fixing them.
A good technology / codebase audit can help your team in many ways, including:
- Preventing and Resolving Scalability Issues
- Cleaning “Technical Debt”
- Fixing Security Problems
- Solving Maintenance and Support Issues
- Identifying Refactoring Opportunities
Preventing and Resolving Scalability Issues
Scaling is difficult. What works for your business at one size may not work at another. As your business grows, it takes on more work, manages more people, and handles more money. Technology that handles a small amount of work, people, or money may not function well when it has to handle twice as much work, people, or money.
The problem has to do with long-term vision. If you have a clear long-term vision of where you want your business to be in the next year, five years, or decade, then you can make an effort to create systems that will scale to meet your needs. If you don’t, you will quickly get lost.
But the future is notoriously hard to predict, and even organizations that have a clear picture of the future can run into scalability issues. That’s when it is crucial to have someone else take a second look at things.
A technology or codebase audit will help your business get back on track with growth by identifying bottlenecks and outdated code in your system. It’s a bit like pruning a tree- you remove blockages to encourage future growth.
Cleaning “Technical Debt”
All platforms accumulate technical debt. Systems need to be constantly maintained, and they are often patched up with quick fixes or solutions that quickly become outdated. This is normal, but over time, technical debt can build up to the point where it becomes a serious problem.
Like monetary debt, technical debt needs to be repaid. A little bit for a short time might not make much difference, but if your system is riddled with technical debt, it will be slower and harder to maintain.
This means that technical debt accrues interest much like monetary debt. With too much of it, your team may wind up spending more time trying to fix their previous quick-fix solutions, and not enough time actually maintaining the system. This leads to a vicious cycle of poorly maintained infrastructure.
The solution is a regular audit of your system. A fresh pair of eyes can identify the most important inefficiencies to fix. This means that, rather than having to start from scratch, you can start from what needs to be fixed the most.
Fixing Security Problems
No system is 100% safe. But it is crucial that you make your system as close to 100% safe as possible. Bad actors are constantly devising new ways of exploiting software loopholes, and there is a never-ending arms race of software system attackers and defenders.
Keeping on top of the current state-of-the-art in security, then, is a full time job. But as your platform grows and expands, it gets filled with outdated libraries, plugins, and 3rd party components that become increasingly vulnerable over time. Unless you can expand your team to keep up, your system will gradually become less secure over time.
To keep up with your security needs, you can get a technology or codebase audit from outside experts. This process will examine your platform with a focus on security, to identify key overlooked weaknesses. Importantly, it allows your team to carry on with their regular work while the outside help finds the most important problems to fix.
Solving Maintenance and Support Issues
Building a good platform for your needs is hard, but maintaining that platform takes even more work. There is a tendency for code to become messier over time, with unused or commented out code proliferating, and making it harder to understand what is going on.
An audit of your system will smooth over the maintenance process by clarifying your system’s code and determining where old code can be moved or deleted. This removes support issues by focusing your efforts on exactly the things that matter.
Reviewing your code saves you time and money in the long run. Each hour spent reviewing code can potentially save dozens spent maintaining and fixing it directly.
Identifying Refactoring Opportunities
Software audits are not just about finding and removing negatives. They are also an opportunity to look for ways to redesign and restructure your existing code to make it better.
Reviewers will look for redundancies, clunky design patterns, and opportunities for abstraction. They will then give suggestions on how the system can be refactored with a better architecture in mind. These changes have the power to improve your system across the board, making security and maintenance issues easier to address in the future.
Software Audits With JetRockets
JetRockets specializes in custom software and mobile application development. While our focus is on building systems from the ground up, we also help businesses fix problems with their existing systems by providing audits of their codebases.
Our team will look at your platform to address scalability issues, clean technical debt, fix security problems, and solve maintenance issues. We will also complete a gap analysis and develop a detailed plan to move your project forward.
Our values as software developers guide our process in auditing code. We seek to align your goals with ours, so that we can deliver precisely the results that you need. We measure our success in results, and work transparently and efficiently to deliver continuous improvement to our clients.
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