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Cases
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Software Audit and Quality Control at dmTECH
Assess Quality
Full service implementation
Company
dm-drogeriemarkt GmbH + Co. KG is a German chain of retail stores, offering cosmetics, healthcare items, household products and health food and drinks.
dmTECH GmbH is 100% subsidiary and provides the complete IT infrastructure for the on-site stores, the web store and logistics.

Mission
During the software audit, a 25-year-old software system with approximately 1.6 million lines of PL/SQL code and 1 million lines of Java code was analyzed. The system was originally purchased as a standard solution but was customized so extensively over the years that about 80% of the executed code is proprietary development. The team behind the system increasingly noticed quality issues, although these were not visible externally. The purpose of the audit was to replace the team’s gut feeling about possible problems with transparency.
In the audit code, system architecture, technologies in use, and established quality assurance processes were analyzed and assessed objectively.
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Involvement of all Stakeholders
Our basic approach to an audit fits well with the corporate culture at dmTECH, which is based on mutual trust. All stakeholders (the product team, IT management, and the customer) were involved in the process from the beginning. The results were discussed without finger-pointing, and it was jointly decided which short-, medium-, and long-term measures should be taken.
Benefit
Our audit transformed the suspicion of potential issues into a list of specific topics that could now be discussed and addressed. The transparency created not only allowed for a realistic assessment of quality but also provided management with the facts needed to make informed decisions about future investments in quality.
Particularly helpful in this regard was uncovering a monolithic architecture, poor maintainability due to excessive nesting depths, and security findings.
Perspective
Based on the audit results, an informed decision was made regarding the future of the system. In the coming years, only acute quality issues, such as security findings, will be addressed and new ones will be avoided. For this purpose, our Software Intelligence Platform Teamscale was introduced as a quality analysis tool. In a few years, the system will be migrated to a newly developed in-house system, where quality will be emphasized from the very beginning.
What we did at dmTECH
The code analysis considers well-accepted quality criteria. It is based on automated analysis using Teamscale, which supports analysis of nearly all programming languages. Our experienced auditors validate the results.
Our experienced auditors contribute manual analyses of criteria not coverable by tools, e.g., the quality of comments in the code, and complement automated analyses by an in-depth review of selected source code files.
Together with the development team, we identify and discuss the components of the system and dependencies between them. We also cover deployment aspects and interaction with other systems, as well as properties like scalability, security and performance.
Together with you, we select relevant changes that are likely to be done to your system. We discuss with the development team the impact of these changes and how well they are supported by the architecture.
Software systems typically rely on a large technology stack including programming languages, databases, frameworks, and libraries. We analyze the relevant technologies for associated risks, based on standardized criteria.
The development process itself contributes significantly to the future-proofness of a system. Based on the phases of a typical process, we discuss tools and methods used by the development team to implement changes. The assessment considers industry standards and established best practices.
What our customers say
Our customers care about the quality of their software.
The software audit pointed out concrete examples of actual risks and threats. This was an essential milestone for all stakeholders to agree on that we should start investing money into the future of this strategically important software system.
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