Enterprise software is a big investment. Buggy software, or software that does not meet the end user’s needs, let alone the business’s requirements, can create greater inefficiencies down the road. These ‘technical debts’ (defects in software that inevitably take more time to fix in the future) can cost businesses heavily. Not only does it create inefficiencies for customers and clients by adding to the workload of customer service, but is also costs them both time and money for redevelopment and reimplementation.
Moreover, as technical debt piles up long term, organizations pay ‘interest’ in the form of more difficult maintainability of software, productivity loss, higher costs and a mediocre user experience. The higher number of problems in the code, the more maintenance is required to clear things up and run the organization effectively.
Why Perform A Software Evaluation
For these reasons, many of our top-tier clients opt to carry out detailed, formal software evaluations before committing to the purchase, adoption or implementation of any software tool. Industry-leading companies frequently carry out software evaluations to quantitatively evaluate the state of their software products, identify inefficiencies and achieve better results in the future.
Software evaluations and assessments give you more control over the lifecycle of the software development and implementation process, and help you address technical debts before they magnify into larger burdens. The assessments give a better understanding of the needs of your users, too, enabling more accurate analysis and planning for future projects, better business decisions and improved employee and user satisfaction and software reliability.
Assessing the Quality of Software
Today, ensuring the quality of a software product is more than simply debugging. Rather, it is about detecting all manner of technical debts, inefficiencies and bottlenecks and improving the overall quality of the product itself. At Hartman Executive Advisors, we take a two-fold approach to software evaluation. This gives businesses a holistic look at key performance data from a broad range of objective-relevant perspectives, allowing them to obtain insights and address problems from all performance areas.
Our criteria-based software assessment is a quantitative assessment of the software in terms of efficacy and maintainability in the following areas:
- Source code quality
- Usability, UI & documentation
- Security
- Performance
- Business logic
- Architecture quality
- Data quality
- Interoperability
Our tutorial-based assessment, in contrast, provides a pragmatic evaluation of the software’s usability, giving developers practical insight into how the software is approached by end users, as well as any potential technical barriers that prevent widespread adoption.
Our effective, multifaceted software analysis can give your IT managers a comprehensive assessment of product quality, and provide them with concrete recommendations on how they can improve the product from multiple dimensions. This can then be further utilized to help inform high-level decisions on specific areas for software performance and usability improvement moving forward.
