A scalable product quality verifier framework for a outsourcing supplier

Outsourced software development is a growing business model that has proven to bring cost-effective and efficient solutions for varying demands of a software product company. Though it has proven its capability in bringing increased market value to stay ahead of competition, there are few inherent problems commonly identified in practice. A prominent issue is how to verify the quality of the code/applications delivered to the customer. Given the fact that a critical bug leaking in to production can bring disastrous results, it is vital to ensure that the deliverables from the supplier conforms to a defined set of quality guidelines. The work described in this paper is the design and implementation of a scalable software quality verification framework targeted towards an outsourcing supplier. The framework enables the supplier to build an industrial grade automated quality verification system, on top of which they may validate and ensure the quality of their deliverables before it reaches the customer. The framework is capable of evaluating both at software code and software application levels. Code level evaluation is done in two phases; first is when the developer tries to add code to the repository (interactive commit stage) and secondly a deeper analysis covering a wide range of problems offline (non-interactive backend analysis). It is important that the rules used for evaluation, actions on results and alerting can be customized to suit the project context. When it comes to the application level, the framework provides a programming interface and a set of tools to verify the artifacts. A case study quality verification system built using this framework proved to add a significant value to the deliverables of a commercial software project. An experiment done with the programming interface showed that powerful and complex analysis systems could be built to evaluate deliverables and even to aid in software due-diligence process.