Audit of Outsourced Software Development: 7 Steps

Running an audit on your outsourcing strategy is a complex process designed to ensure the success of software development projects by locating weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the existing software development strategy. The core idea is to identify and eliminate the efficiency bottlenecks and make relevant improvements to ensure tangible success on the project goals. However, the audit of outsourced software development is not limited to just making sure your team is doing a great job. The ultimate goal is to evaluate the entire business strategy, align the technical expertise of the team with the business goals, make sure the team has all the necessary equipment, and strengthen the development process to achieve all the results you’ve been hoping for. 

To make sure you are going in the right direction, you should follow a software development process audit checklist. The checklist gives you a complete view of the project allowing you to create a comprehensive strategy for implementing the necessary improvements throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC). Here at Intersog, we follow similar checklists, depending on the client’s needs, to make sure all of our decisions are well-informed and all of our solutions are on point. 

Review a Mission

It all starts with defining a mission for the project – what are you trying to accomplish? What is your vision for the end product? Who is your target audience? What is your marketing strategy? These are the essential questions you need to answer before you get to work. Once you have these figured out, you can get to figuring out the business value you intend to achieve throughout the SDLC. So, you’ve got to align your strategy with the following objectives:

• Develop a formal plan – do you have all the major milestones, deadlines, and deliverables mapped out? Make sure all of these align with your success markers and create a project roadmap that leads to achieving success every step of the way.
• Scope, objectives, and costs – communicate all of these to the involved stakeholders, especially the development team. The software development team has to know what they are working towards and what resources they can count on so that they can adjust their approach and work within the established context.
• Prioritize the right work – make sure your IT outsourcing strategy and the external team give you more value than an internal team would; otherwise, the whole endeavor would be pointless.
• Align the budget – make sure your current spending and budget correspond to your business goals and allocate the resources in such a manner as to ensure high ROI.

Check Your Timeline and Spending

Proper financial planning is the key here, and software audit can help you make financial planning much easier. But before you can define the budget, you must map out the scope of the project. If you do not know how much time and money your project would take, you can check out any case study for similar projects to have at least some idea in your mind. Of course, as each project is unique, so are the timeline and the budgeting needs. At Intersog, we help our clients estimate how long it would take to develop custom software for your company. Knowing the timeline for your software development life cycle, you can be more precise in defining the project budgeting needs. 

Planning your budget is essential for maximizing the efficiency of the SDLC and ensuring a solid return on investment. The essential part of software development process audit is knowing when, where, and how much you spend, and that might also be a tricky thing to define. Knowing how much it would cost to develop custom software, you can allocate your resources with laser precision, and that is where Intersog can help you as well. 

Thanks to effective auditing, you can cut your spending by removing redundancies, unwanted software, and outdated systems that only drain your resources without giving you any results. You can also predict possible breakdowns and keep your entire IT ecosystem on the right trail. By consulting with the experts at Intersog, you can figure out exactly what your company needs and what it does not need so that you do not waste your budget. 

Analyze the Technologies

Verifying the relevance of the software is one of the important steps in your software development life cycle audit checklist, and you should first evaluate your current state of technological readiness for the project. Is the system you are running with outdated and needs to be taken down and replaced by the new one? Or is it still relevant and simply needs some rework to function at the peak performance? You need to establish what it would take for you to take your company to a new level. Together with your vendor, you can analyze the relevant technologies that would help you reach your objectives.

Check the Documentation

Proper documentation must be maintained at all stages of the software development process audit. You must document all the equipment, virtual inventory, software development, and deployment inventory, user and entitlement data, ownership data, and all the other project details must be documented. Of course, the documentation might be trickier when you use an agile software development audit checklist as the agile approach is notorious for its poor record-keeping capacity. However, if you put some effort into it and keep things organized, the report and documentation creation might be done with spectacular efficiency. 

Evaluate the Organizational Structure

Establishing a proper organizational structure for your project is a paramount step that defines how all the project-related activities will be allocated, coordinated, and monitored. You must make sure everybody involved in the project knows what they are responsible for, who they report to, what tasks they need to finish, and what results they are expected to demonstrate by the end of each project milestone. As a software development company, Intersog offers you a full dedicated team of developers who can get your product from start to finish on their own, but if you and your internal developers are going to be involved, it is vital for us to evaluate and clearly define the organizational structure for the project. This would create the necessary boundaries within which the developers would operate. 

Check the Code Quality

The quality and security of your code are the key to the overall success of your product and your ROI. For that reason, quality assurance monitoring is an integral part of a software audit, especially if you are already experiencing problems with it due to a lack of transparency or efficiency bottlenecks. A thorough investigation of the processes behind the software development will surely help figure out where and why your product might fail. 

It is also important to ensure the industry standards compliance. First and foremost, you want to be certain of your product’s security and the Defense Information Systems Administration standard compliance. The DISA project compliance can be achieved by implementing relevant security practices and data encryption software. The software development process audit is an essential mechanism for keeping the quality of the product in check and providing continuous monitoring of the SDLC to create maximum value for the business.

Check the Teamwork Effectiveness

An efficient workflow depends heavily on the cooperation within the development team, which is why you have to include it on your audit checklist. When you hire dedicated team of developers, you must be sure they are working as a team and communicate constantly to achieve your project goals. You cannot hope to build a perfect product if your team is not perfect. That is why you need a finely-tuned team of hand-picked developers who can work with other people as a team. Intersog helps you with that one too as we provide you with the teams of the industry’s best software developers.

Final Thoughts

An audit of the software development process is an essential part of ensuring the efficiency of your outsourced team. Your goal, however, is not simply to control the process, but to make sure your developers have the access to all the information and resources they need for the job. If you partner with the right vendor, most headaches can be alleviated in a heartbeat. After all, you can outsource most of your tasks, even the audit itself. Either way, if you aim at building truly awesome software for your audience, it is vital that you keep the development process in check and oversee the team’s performance at all stages of the SDLC.

Intersog’s teams of professional software developers have all the experience, knowledge, as well as equipment necessary to deliver tangible success on any type of software development project. We use the industry’s best practices and adhere to all the relevant quality and security standards to give you the product you need.