Why and When Do You Require A Technical Audit for Your Software?

In 2022, poor software quality costed the U.S. economy around $2.41 trillion. There are many reasons behind this problem – security breaches, infrastructure issues, system inconsistencies, bugs. failed upgrades, and poor maintenance. What’s really concerning is how expensive these problems can get.

Often, business constraints and particular solutions lead companies to technical issues that can mount over time and form a technical debt. When the problem escalates beyond a certain point, routine monitoring and checks won’t cut it. At that stage, it’s time to run a technical audit of the software system, which is a task for experienced tech review and technology consulting partners.

Let’s explore the main aspects of a technical audit, reasons for running it, and common scenarios in which a technical audit is essential.

To start off, we need to define a software technical audit and its main aspects. A technical software audit is a thorough examination of the crucial software system’s components aimed at assessing its quality, security, compliance, and other critical features. This audit is conducted by an experienced team of technically skilled specialists who have a clear framework for accessing software and the company’s IT practices. Quite often, the team uses specific audit software and tools to automate and enhance the efficiency of the review process. Typically, solutions architects take the main role during technical audits. However, the auditing team composition may differ according to your needs. Such teams may involve experienced software developers, quality assurance specialists, UI/UX designers, and business analysts.

Technical audits may involve a variety of steps. These are the ones that we typically conducted at Leobit:

• Analysis of technologies during which our specialists review the consistency of a programming language, frameworks, databases, and integrations to understand the relevance of the tech stack, identify technical debt, and review the tech stack’s alignment with your business needs.
• Architecture audit where we review the system’s modularity, scalability, and integration capabilities. This stage also involves collaborative workshops that leverage the ISO/IEC 25010 standard to assess the non-functional and quality attributes like scalability, security, maintainability, and performance.
• Infrastructure assessment during which we review the system’s software and hardware environments to highlight its inefficiencies and ways to reduce its cost, evaluate the system’s overall feasibility, and review the system in terms of its business continuity.
• Code review that involves a thorough assessment of the system’s codebase. It helps us identify bottlenecks and areas for improving the code’s efficiency, as well as evaluate the readability and maintainability of the codebase.
• Security and software compliance audit during which we assess how your solution protects its sensitive data, detect system vulnerabilities, and leverage our security expertise, proven by the ISO 27001:2022 certification, to ensure that the product complies with the regulations relevant to your industry.
• Performance testing, a phase that involves load testing, during which we review how your software handles high volumes of data, and stress testing, which helps us assess the software’s performance under extreme conditions.

There are also optional phases that are not included in all technical software audits:

• Review of processes, which involves examining the efficiency of existing workflows. To identify process bottlenecks and inconsistencies, software auditing specialists might analyze multiple factors, such as the composition of the team working with the system, process alignment with industry best practices, development and maintenance processes, code review and approval practices, DevOps workflows, etc.
• UI/UX review that involves the evaluation of software look, usability, and accessibility to end-users.

Technical audits may differ depending on the customer’s needs and problems. However, a complete audit involves the assessment of all of the above-mentioned aspects. The auditing team examines the software system layer by layer to identify and document all the potential issues, areas of improvement, and peculiar features that matter in terms of system management or upgrade.

A technical audit brings you a complete and clear picture of your software system, whether it goes about an existing product or a product that is under ongoing development. All the information is documented, and you can return to this documentation at any time for clarification.

Therefore, you need technical software audit services for the reasons enumerated below.

Incompatible cross-version interaction is a leading cause of failed software upgrades amounting to 63% of such cases. A technical audit allows companies to understand such potential issues and prepare for a scale-up or other type of software upgrade efficiently.

A recent survey from McKinsey reveals that 30% of digitized company CIOs believe that more than 20% of their technical budget is spent on resolving issues related to tech debt. Technical debt is the cost of software rework or maintenance caused by choosing quick, cheap, and temporary technical solutions over more thorough ones during the development phase. This problem can be mitigated with a well-grounder technical audit aimed at uncovering the main reasons for technical debt and helping businesses find the most effective and cost-efficient ways to deal with it.

Your IT team may know everything about your software system, but, sometimes, to make the things look better, you may need a fresh perspective. A team of specialists running a technical audit of your system can bring such a perspective and identify issues or areas for improvement from a viewpoint that hasn’t been explored before.

Security remains a hot topic in the software development domain as new cybersecurity threats appear and grow regularly. In particular, according to Forbes, the number of ransomware attack victims rose by 128.17% between 2022 and 2023. Technical audits allow businesses to identify software vulnerabilities and security issues on time and craft strategies for safeguarding their digital system.

Problems with documentation are common in software development projects. Lack of documentation on code, architectural features, integrations, and scripts translates into a lack of awareness of your software product. As a result, troubleshooting the emerging issues or customizing your software becomes more challenging and, therefore, expensive. A software audit process can help you bring order and organization to project documentation. The results of the audit are properly documented and you get a credible and detailed source of knowledge about your system and its features.

Now, let’s get to some practical scenarios. Here we outline common cases in which a company needs a technical audit. If your business is facing any of the situations below, you’ll likely need to get a software technical audit from a skilled auditing team.

A recent study from IDC Financial Insights states that digital banks are very likely to spend $57.1 billion on legacy payments technology in 2028. The problem of legacy software is peculiar not only to the fintech industry, as many companies across different domains keep paying excessive costs and dealing with software inefficiency due to legacy systems.

Whether it goes about a particular technical debt, some software components that haven’t been updated for long, or a system that is legacy in its fundamentals, a technical audit is a solution. It helps you identify the opportunities for modernizing your system, as well as define the best cost optimization strategies. This will help you identify the main areas for improvement. As a result, you will prioritize corrective actions and streamline the system modernization process more efficiently, saving cost, time, and effort.

Employee turnover often proves to be very costly for digitized businesses. In particular, each departing employee costs an organization $18,591. Meanwhile, if the departing employee is a tech lead or other essential project knowledge holder, such a loss might be even more damaging.

If such an employee doesn’t manage to transfer one’s knowledge to other employees, it is vital to hire specialists capable of understanding all the system’s essential features. A technical auditing team that thoroughly examines software, documents all findings, and helps your company preserve critical project knowledge is the ultimate solution.

Deloitte’s study reveals that the system analysis and design phase is the origin of software defects in 64% of cases. Many companies fail to document the system, its features, and requirements properly, which has a very adverse impact on its manageability. The point is that some important system intricacies remain hidden or misunderstood.

A technical audit helps you organize documentation and get a clearer understanding of your project and its critical aspects.Code reviews, analysis of the system’s architecture and functionality, security analysis, and other stages of the technical audit will help you reconstruct the missing information and fill in the gaps to provide clarity on how the system operates. As a result of technical audit, you will receive various types of documentation, including system architecture diagrams, process flows, data models, API documentation, configuration manuals, and many more. All this documentation will be extremely useful for the future system development, maintenance, and troubleshooting.

When something about your software has to be changed dramatically, you need to consider a great number of details about your existing system. Sometimes, the knowledge you already possess may be not enough for scaling, customizing, or redesigning your solution properly.

A technical audit helps you analyze your existing system and find the best ways to change or scale the solution. For example, in case you want to integrate your software with AI services, you may need to understand its data architecture clearly. This is vital for supplying your AI transformation tools with the most relevant information. You can get such knowledge with a comprehensive audit conducted by database architecture specialists.

Many apps face performance issues or bugs that may be rather costly. According to recent statistics, operational failures cost digitized businesses from around the world $1.56 trillion annually. Traditionally, quality assurance specialists identify the problems and find ways to solve them with rigorous testing practices.

However, if the source of the problem is deep in the underlying level of your solution or is just challenging to identify, you will need to run a complete software system audit. This will help you identify the root cause, as well as other system vulnerabilities that may hinder its performance or cause large-scale software failures. You will get a broad overview of your system, allowing you to take the most relevant and cost-efficient actions to solve its problems.

In 2023, there were 2,365 reported cyberattacks affecting 343,338,964 victims in total. Failure to secure your software from such threats brings you legal and compliance issues, negatively impacts your reputation, and can lead to a damaging loss of business-sensitive data.

A software security audit may protect you from the above-mentioned threats. A comprehensive system review will help you identify security vulnerabilities and endpoints that threaten your sensitive data. Later, you can start working on eliminating and preventing such issues.

If you are operating under strict regulations or industry standards, you need to focus on compliance. For example, U.S.-based healthcare businesses should comply with HIPAA, or you may need to adjust to the OWASP standards for software solutions. Failure to comply with relevant rules, regulations, and standards can subject you to fines, legal issues, or significant reputational losses. No wonder that digitized businesses are projected to spend 50% more costs on compliance tools by 2026. A certain way to save costs is running a technical audit oriented on software regulation compliance.

Such an audit typically involves the following stages: software evaluation against specific regulatory standards, gap analysis, and remediation planning. A software audit helps you avoid legal penalties and security breaches and ensures that the software is reliable, secure, and aligned with industry best practices.

In some cases, you should constantly stay on top of the things happening to your system. For example, if you are running hospital management software, dealing with governmental contracts, or running a system that prioritizes 24/7 availability, you need permanent system control.

You can detect potential issues in advance and prevent them with a technical audit. Such audits help you identify system vulnerabilities early, allowing for timely updates and patches. This approach is also important for continuous system development and mitigating the potential issues before they impact your solution. Regular audits might not be as comprehensive as occasional technical audits because you constantly keep your software in a good state with little issues to detect and fix. The point of such audits is mostly ensuring that the system continues conforming to your business needs and keeping your documentation relevant and up-to-date. In addition, conducting regular software development audit iterations throughout the development process helps you build a product with minimum-to-no vulnerabilities.

In sum, a technical audit is a certain way to keep your software efficient, enhance its manageability, or prepare it for scale-ups or any other radical changes. It may involve several stages, from the assessment of technologies to UI/UX design and process review. After the audit, you will understand growth opportunities, get a new perspective on your system, review your system’s security, organize software documentation, and mitigate technical debt.

Opt for the technical audit when you need to scale or change your system dramatically or you are dealing with legacy software and need to identify ways for its modernization or mitigate technical debt. A technical audit is also a tried and tested solution for the situations where you need to organize system documentation or you are facing significant performance or functionality issues. Such a step will also help you assess your system’s security, comply with particular regulations or standards, or you just need to be constantly on top of your system.

One of the most important factors pertaining to a technical audit is finding the right team with a practical framework and relevant experience. Leobit, a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Digital App and Innovation and a company with expertise and maturity proven by ISO 27001/9001 and several awards from Clutch, is ready to provide you with the right people for a technical audit. You may check a technical audit report sample from one of our recent projects to understand our approach better. Contact us, and let’s keep your software cost-efficient, secure, productive, and prepared for future upgrades and modernizations.