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Parasoft’s Code Audit solution delivers the visibility and consistency needed to reduce the risks of outsourcing and geographically-distributed development. An automated framework manages software verification methods to ensure that all software development activities meet your expectations. This enables a consistent workflow that reduces downstream rework. Moreover, reports provide objective, real-time information about code quality, requirement implementation status, and the process being used to build and test the code. The system alerts you to issues as they emerge so you can address them before they impact deadlines or budgets.

The Challenge

The greatest challenge of distributed development is how to ensure that high-quality, flexible code is delivered promptly and predictably—regardless of obstacles such as communication barriers, different development environments, and team turnover. Developers might implement code based on a misunderstanding of your requirements and quality policies. The outsourcer’s status estimations might be inaccurate or untruthful. Or, the code might be completed on time, but require tremendous rework. These and other headaches can be prevented by establishing a process that ensures code is developed according to your expectations, using an automated infrastructure to drive this process, then actively monitoring the developers’ adherence to the process.

Solution Scope

Our solution scope includes:

• Static code analysis using industry-standard and custom rules: To ensure that the code meets uniform expectations around security, reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Data flow analysis: To enable early and effortless detection of critical runtime errors that might otherwise take weeks to find.
• Metrics analysis: To identify brittle or overly-complex code that could impede agility.
• Peer code review process automation: To ensure that all new code gets reviewed by peers and all identified issues are resolved.
• Unit test generation and execution: To start verifying reliability and functionality before the complete system is ready, reducing the length and cost of downstream processes such as debugging.
• Automated regression testing: To ensure that the team is alerted when modifications impact application behavior.
• Test case “tracing”: To extend the existing regression test suite by simply running use case scenarios on the working application.
• Runtime error detection: To automatically identify difficult-to-find errors that could cause the application to behave erratically or crash.

Parasoft Delivers Quality as a Continuous Process

Parasoft empowers organizations to deliver better business applications faster. We achieve this by delivering quality as a continuous process across the SDLC—not just QA. Our solutions promote strong code foundations, solid functional components, and robust business processes. Parasoft’s Code Audit solution provides an automated infrastructure that delivers quality as a continuous process, allowing you to ensure that quality is built into code (regardless of where it is developed), then protected as the code base evolves.

Error Prevention
Parasoft’s Code Audit solution automates a wide variety of software verification methods (including peer code review, static analysis, data flow analysis, and metrics analysis) in a way that ensures they are applied correctly and consistently across each team’s software development process. Developers verify conformance to objective criteria as code is developed, then conformance is verified again upon code check in. By exposing structural errors as they are introduced and preventing entire classes of errors, this verification provides a foundation for producing solid code and prevents surprises later in the process. Moreover, this initiates the continuous quality process, delivering greater productivity and significantly fewer software defects.

Continuous Regression Testing
Parasoft’s Code Audit solution automatically builds and continuously executes a robust, extensible regression test suite that determines if code modifications impact existing functionality. The risks of code modifications having unexpected impacts is especially high with distributed development teams. Establishing a system for ensuring that impacts are identified and addressed immediately reduces the risk of change and enables rapid, agile responses to business demands.

Functional Audit
When error prevention and continuous regression testing are performed at the development level, QA and business analysts can focus on validating end-to-end business scenarios, and even reuse existing test assets to achieve this goal. This enables your team to execute a more complete audit of your business application. The result is a reduced risk of business downtime, ensuring business continuity.

Process Visibility and Control
SDLC quality metrics are fragmented across key systems such as requirements, build, and source control management. Parasoft aggregates and correlates this system data, delivering a comprehensive view of the development processes. This process visibility facilitates continuous process improvement, increasing productivity and reducing cost.

Technologies Supported

C/C++ Java .NET languages (C#, Visual Basic, Managed C++) SOA / Web services Web Applications Web 2.0 RIA AJAX SOAP BPEL Multiple Message Protocols JSP XML HTML JavaScript WSDL EJB CSS VBScript/ASP

Compatible Software and Platforms

Eclipse Rational Application Developer Microsoft Visual Studio Wind River Borland IntelliJ Oracle BEA Software AG/webMethods IBM MQ-Series TIBCO Sonic IONA HP Other leading platforms