Where to start · Technical aspect · Existing software
Can we still evolve this system?
What it will cost you to evolve the software you already have, where it pays to intervene and what is better left where it is.
10 daysdelivery from kickoff
When you need it
- Every change costs more than the last and nobody can explain exactly why.
- Estimates have become unreliable and releases are frightening.
- The people who wrote the system are gone and the knowledge sits in a few heads.
- You have to choose between evolving, rewriting or replacing, and the debate has become ideological.
- You are about to acquire or sell a product and you need an independent technical reading.
- You want to know what the next year of evolution would really cost.
What we answer
- What it costs today to introduce a change, and how that cost is changing.
- Which parts of the system are healthy, which are fragile and which are simply old.
- Where technical debt is actually holding you back, and where it is harmless.
- How reliability and performance hold up against what you will need a year from now.
- How predictable your testing, release and recovery process is.
What we do
- We analyse the code with static tools and read the parts that matter by hand.
- We cross complexity, change frequency and defect density to find the places where cost really concentrates.
- We assess test coverage and usefulness, build times, release and recovery procedures.
- We examine how incidents and defects are handled, and how much of the team's time they absorb.
- We quantify the expected cost of evolution and compare it with the alternatives.
What you receive
A document of about twenty pages. This is the actual table of contents, not an example.
- Architectural consistency and health by area
- Code quality and where the debt concentrates
- Maintainability: expected cost of change
- Reliability and performance against the goals
- Testing, build, release and recovery
- Incident and defect management
- Scenarios compared, with costs: evolve, remediate, replace
The decision you will be able to make
Evolve · Remediate selectively · Rewrite
With cost estimates based on the real state of the code.
And then?
If the way forward is selective remediation, the natural next step is a fixed-budget project on the first areas to stabilise, or team augmentation with our specialists to speed up the refactoring.
Format
- Investment
- A fixed, modest cost, agreed before starting.
- Delivery
- Ten days from kickoff. Kickoff within five working days of confirmation.
- Your time
- About 6 hours in total from your development team or technical leads, spread over three meetings.
- Scope included
- One application scope, up to 3 main repositories or a defined monolithic codebase. Beyond this scope we agree an extension.
- For the ten days to be kept
- Access to the source code and architectural documentation arrives by the second day. If something slips, we tell you straight away.
It is an entry format at dedicated conditions, designed to get to know each other by working together. It is not our standard project rate.
What it is not
- It is not an automatic SonarQube report: it includes qualitative analysis and manual reading of the code.
- It is not an accounting or legal due diligence.
- It does not oblige you to have us do the remediation: the document is a guide for any technical team.