QUALITY AND OPTIMIZATION

Q-Care

A fundamental key to quality

Q-Care

Software quality is a critical success factor for the long term competitiveness of business organisations. Poor software quality results in poor functional and operational performance, and in a cumbersome and expensive maintenance process that compromises time-to-market efforts.

Given the size, complexity and heterogeneity of business software, manual inspection methods are not sufficient: lots of human resources and expertise must be put together to check even a small number of software quality issues.

Automated code analysis and certification techniques support the formal verification that outsourced code is compliant with the quality standards contracted in service-level agreements.

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The Issues

There are a number of issues to consider when adopting consistent software code quality assurance measures, namely:

  • How can one standardize, ensure and rate the quality of source code produced in-house or developed by third parties?
  • How can quality concerns such as complexity, style, documentation, nomenclature, portability and interoperability be automatically enforced across the IT organization?
  • How can one avoid performance "bottlenecks" well before the testing and production phases?
  • How can one increase the efficiency of Software Quality Departments?

Q-CARE : Quality on the Palm of Your Hand

Q-CARE is a versatile and powerful tool that can be easily and effectively used enabling organizations to:

  • Automatically enforce their enterprise-specific and industry-recommended quality standards and best practices;
  • Collate these quality standards in one repository and store this as a corporate asset;
  • Automatically assess, measure and monitor the quality and maintainability of applications, and guide the process of correcting non-conformance;
  • Detect programming practices that may negatively affect performance;
  • Optimize the efficiency of quality assurance teams.

How Q-CARE Works

The power and added value that Q-CARE provides stems from two elements:

  • A highly-reconfigurable repository of quality standards and good-practices as collected from industry experts and from previous development efforts. This includes rules on the acceptable values for code complexity, maintainability and other quality metrics. The repository can be customized with the desired standards per organisation or per project.
  • A set of sophisticated code analysis techniques that take as inputs the standards repository and the source code artifacts to be inspected, and produce comprehensive reports on all violations of quality standards, bad-practices and the values of quality metrics and ratings. Results can then be stored, processed and published (e.g. Web), which can be consulted by development, quality assurance and management teams as required.

The following picture illustrates a quality assurance process using Q-CARE.

Q-CARE currently provides support for a wide variety of languages, including COBOL (various dialects), Delphi(2007), Java, C#, VB6, VB.NET, SQL, PL/SQL and JavaScript. Its internal structure accommodates other languages easily.

A Case Study

The international financial group Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) adopted Q-CARE with significant improvements in code efficiency, costs and development and maintenance time.