Symbiosis Software
Symbiosis Software
We specialize in reviewing software designs, documentation, and source code.
Our goal is to maximize the quality of your project with the least effort on your part.
It is commonly known that external software reviews generally provide very large savings in the long run:
| Stage | Price per design error | Price per coding error |
|---|---|---|
| Design | $1 | |
| Coding | $10 | $1 |
| Testing | $100 | $10 |
| End-User | $1,000 | $100 |
Commonly, the savings are much bigger than depicted above, especially over a span of time of a few years.
The figures basically say that it costs one thousand times as much that an end-user discovers a design error as if the designer himself or herself had discovered the problem. In the same way, it costs about one hundred times as much to have the end-user find a coding error as it costs for the developer himself or herself to find the error. This is all due to the many layers that typically exist in a modern software development business: Designers, Developers, Testers, Build Masters, Translators, Supporters, and all the rest. Each layer adds its own overhead in terms of cost per discovered defect.
It is therefore a very finansially rewarding process to let an external and independent consultant review your source code. The consultant will normally act in between the designer and the coder (when reviewing documentation), or in between the coder and the tester (when reviewing source code), for which reason you can expect to save much more than you would have saved if the Test department had located the issue.
The size of the savings depend upon how early in the process you make use of the consultant: The earlier you involve the consultant, the greater your savings, which is why all software development businesses should apply external consultants already at the design stage and all the way through the coding stage. The savings are not directly proportional to the amount of time that you let the consultant spend. The general pattern is that the early hours result in most findings, whereas the latter hours only result in few discoveries. Typically, you want to employ a consultant for a span of perhaps ten to fourty hours. After that, the consultant will be much less likely to discover defects and/or valuable insights as he or she becomes accustomed to the material and therefore begin to become "blind" towards its flaws and faults, just like an ordinary designer or programmer does.
The advantage of an external review is that he or she can pinpoint weaknesses very easily (think of how clever an external observer of a game of chess is), whereas the tester usually can only locate the general area of the problem and have to rely on the coder to actually spend time on precisely locating the issue and fixing it. The reviewer can, if he or she works on source code, provide a line number and contextual information that allows the coder to very quickly correct the problem, which means even more savings for your company.
Unfortunately, most coders in the world perceive themselves as the ultimate coder of all coders everywhere. This is simply a mental illness that is an almost unavoidable side-effect of the process of programming. This perception of self goes greatly against the hundreds of simple syntactic and semantic errors that contemporary compilers discover for the coder on a daily basis.
Finally, an external consultant is not bound by intra-group considerations such as "This guy has worked here ten years!" or "This guy is dating the boss' daughter", normal considerations that influence how willing your staff is to be open and frank about real and perceived problems. The reviewer does his or her job completely without knowing the involved persons. However, the consultant is expected to be courteous and helpful at all times so he or she is not there to drive anybody out of the company, but rather to ensure that everybody makes the best use of their personal potential.