Why Your Company Needs a Code Review

When your business makes headlines, you don’t want it to be because of software glitches caused by subpar source code. Everything may look great on the surface, but cracks in the foundation—such as incorrect assumptions, untested scenarios, noncompliance with best practices, and other errors and omissions in the code—can quickly cause your company’s reputation to come tumbling down.

Here are six of the top reasons your company should consider a code review:

1. You want to preemptively assess the status and quality of your source code to head off any problems.It’s a wise move to ensure that your software is performing optimally from the beginning. Many companies do not fully test and evaluate how software performs under every condition, instead neglecting the issue until a customer complains about a problem. Worse yet, not every customer will take the time to write a review or contact your customer service department. Instead, they’ll just move on to another software provider, but they may share their dissatisfaction with other potential customers along the way. Undergo a thorough source code review at the get-go, and your customers—and your bottom line and brand perception—will benefit.
2. You have identified a specific problem with your code and need research and recommendations on how to fix it.No matter how skilled the programmer or coder, an independent analyst will always catch problems the developer couldn’t see—especially when that analyst is a world-class software expert. In a code review, analysts are trained to sift through a mountain of data to pinpoint the underlying error(s) causing the software glitch. This kind of focused expertise cannot be replicated by automated bug-searching tools or the programmers themselves. Once thorough research of the problem within your code is complete, the code review analyst will provide the steps and implementation tools to correct the issue.
3. There are widespread problems with your code—causing system crashes, poor usability, customer complaints, and lost profits—and you need help to triage and stabilize the issue.A code review can quickly and thoroughly identify and help correct all the missteps in your source code, as well as find any so-far-undiscovered errors that could lead to further problems down the road, to restore user experience and brand image to peak levels in no time.
4. You need to evaluate the coding abilities of an interviewee or current employee.Perhaps one of your staff members seems to be slipping in terms of the quality of their work or you want to see if he or she is capable of taking on more responsibility. Or maybe you are hiring to fill a software developer position, and the job candidate has submitted a portfolio of work to demonstrate his or her skills. To ensure that you’re making the right decision, an outside code review can provide an objective assessment of the skill level and quality of the software and source code in question.
5. You are buying or selling a software company (or a company containing software assets) and want an independent review and assessment of the software’s quality.When a major purchase or sale is at stake, you want to be sure you’re making an informed decision. No matter the type, size, or programming language of the software to be evaluated, a code review executed by a software industry expert can help you determine what the software is capable of, if there are any errors or undefined behaviors in its source code, whether there are any security risks, and whether there is patentable technology or any possible copyright/patent infringement issues at stake.
6. You are involved in a dispute over source code—for example, whether the workmanship is of professional quality—and need an expert evaluation to settle it.Code reviews test and inspect for proper design, security, language and technology appropriateness, performance, and more. When a piece of software and its foundational source code are in dispute, an independent and unbiased evaluation will serve as irrefutable evidence in the settlement.

Prolifogy source code reviews are executed by our team of software industry veterans and world-class software engineering experts. We perform analysis on software systems of all shapes and sizes and in several programming languages, including (but not limited to) C, C++, C#, Java, Objective C, Verilog, and VHDL. Learn more about Prolifogy code reviews.

To get started or to learn more about our code review services, call (855) 776-5436 or use our Contact form.

Are you an attorney looking for a code review as part of an intellectual property matter? Prolifogy can help. For more details, visit our legal code review page.