Software audit completed for telecom leader

Exia has successfully completed a major software systems audit for an international telecommunications leader. The firm recently acquired another company and with the acquisition came software of unknown value.

The objective of the architecture and code audit was to determine the quality, maintainability and supportability of specific software applications written in Microsoft .NET, ASP and Java. The outputs of the analysis were used by the client to help formulate decisions and create a plan for using, supporting, maintaining and upgrading the applications in an industrial production environment with many users.

The audit provided the client with the information needed to make business decisions about the software base, such as:

The result of the audit was that the client was able to make informed decisions about the acquired software base that they could not otherwise make, such as whether to build on the existing software or to replace it over time.

The following excerpt of the report's conclusions illustrates how Exia makes specific recommendations that can be acted on by the client:

We agree with the staging environment plan and hardware plan.
We question the choice of Subversion for version control, preferring Team Foundation Server.
Build and migration through the staging environments should be automated to the greatest extent possible and this can be assisted greatly by Team Foundation Server.
The proposed system architecture is solid.
We agree strongly with the choice of SQL Server over Oracle for .NET application development.
We agree strongly with the use of service agents (communicators) for accessing external web services and data stores.
Communicators may be able to provide data directly to the business layer rather than going through the data access layer as indicated in the architecture diagram. Or they may work side by side with the data access layer as assistants.
We discuss data access challenges in depth and discuss the benefits of tools that solve object-relational impedance mismatch issues, such as the Exia Data Layer Factory.

These conclusions are supported by a thorough analysis. An excerpt of the analysis is below:

The application architecture correctly indicates communication with the external services (HUB) and its brokerage by Communicators. The application Communicators correspond to Service Agents in the Microsoft reference architecture. When a business component needs to use functionality provided in an external service, the communicators (service agents) manage the semantics of communicating with that particular service. Service agents isolate the idiosyncrasies of calling diverse services from the application, and provide additional services, such as basic mapping between the format of the data exposed by the service and the format required by the application. In this way the business layer is able to consume data in a consistent incoming format.

Software analysis and audit is one of Exia's core service offerings and can help organizations quickly and accurately evaluate existing software assets, and obtain concise recommendations for actions, backed up by thorough research.