Quality assurance services for software

Providing assurance over custom-developed software applications

Is your software doing what it’s supposed to? Is it performing accurately and efficiently? Do you understand how your software functions? Are your developers following your standards? Are you getting your money’s worth? Are you in compliance with all of your open source software license agreements? If you answered yes, are you sure?

Meeting the challenges of custom software development in legacy and non-legacy environments

To meet complex business needs and control proprietary information, businesses have developed software applications in-house. Custom development requires maintaining quality and knowledge of how the software functions. Failing to do either can result in significant costs and risks.

Due to the prevalence and aging of specialized applications and the unique challenges associated with owning them, businesses are seeking insights into the logic, accuracy, suitability, security and code efficiency of these software systems.

Regardless of the complexity or age of the underlying software, PwC’s Code Assurance Services can evaluate your application source code and help you address their inherent risk, and ultimately reduce software maintenance cost.

Improving software code, data quality and integrity

Custom applications are often developed and deployed without the rigor and discipline of standard systems development life cycle (SDLC) processes, including:

Use cases may not be thorough or even nonexistent.
Development standards could be violated.
Object-oriented programming concepts may be weakly implemented.
Open-source code may be improperly used or attributed.
Corners may have been cut when implementing automated application controls.

Understanding software business logic

A limited understanding of how a system works can translate into production issues, protracted maintenance cycles and hindered transformation initiatives. Over time, drivers such as the following can result in reducing an organization’s overall understanding of their applications:

Lack of software documentation.
Source code that’s fragmented, hard to read and difficult to maintain due to years of enhancements and fixes.
Historical reliance on a small set of subject matter experts.
Out of date documentation.