6 Steps To Take Control of Your Software Quality
Tags: devops, productivity, codequality, engineeringmanagement
Published: 2020-11-05 11:51:51

See the practical steps to control software quality and meet the software intelligence to level up.


![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/llf799junoj04kdgsscz.png)


All the product teams want to **deliver high-quality products** to the end-users to meet customer needs and enhance customer satisfaction. Therefore, the **engineering teams try to build** more reliable, more secure, more stable, and high-performance software and systems.

There are **6 practical steps** below that every engineering team should follow **to take control of their software quality**. If you want to level up in managing your software quality and development efficiency, check out the bonus section and **meet the software intelligence**.

## 1. Track And Visualize Coding Activities
The software development process is a *black-box*. If you want to see inside the box, you should try to focus on the **development activities of your team**, such as *code commits, pushes, pull/merge requests, code review cycles*... Visualizing these activities provides **actionable insights** into your development processes, helps you identify bottlenecks, reduce lead time, and increase development efficiency.

Check out Git analytics and pull request analytics tools such as *[QA Dashboard](https://dashboard.qa/), Pluralsight Flow, GitHub Insights*…

## 2. Analyze Source Code Quality
You can consider code quality as the cornerstone of software quality. Check out the **action plan** below to enable **continuous inspection** on code quality.

* Enable on-the-fly code analysis by using IDE extensions.
* Analyze your code as a part of the CI/CD pipeline.
* Set quality gates and break the builds.
* Track all issues and make them visible.
* Encourage developers to talk about clean code principles, coding standards, etc.
* Plan code quality tasks for each sprint.

Check out the code analysis tools such as *SonarQube, CAST, Fortify, etc.*, try to integrate them into your CI/CD pipelines…

## 3. Care About Code Vulnerabilities
You probably have some **security-related issues** in your codebase, but you don’t care about them until they have discovered by attackers. Employ a Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tool to analyze your code, detect issues, and own them to solve.

Check out the SAST tools like *SonarQube, Checkmarx, WhiteSource and Fortify*, try to integrate them on your CI/CD pipelines…

## 4. Test What You Code
It’s not possible to know that if your software is working properly without testing it. Consider increasing your **test coverage** by enabling various test types such as unit testing, integration testing, API testing, UI testing, and functional testing…

Check out the testing practices, frameworks, and tools to test what you code. Furthermore, consider using test management tools such as *Testinium, Zephyr, TestRail, etc.* to monitor test execution results.

## 5. Monitor Application Performance
Application performance monitoring tools help you understand which problems your **end-users** are facing (customer satisfaction metrics, APDEX score, etc.) and which problems you have in your **application** or **system** (response time, error rate, infrastructure metrics, etc.).

## 6. Make Your Issues Visible
A software development process always produces **issues in all stages of the application life cycle**. You should capture, assign, and track the issues, and also you should make them **visible**. Keep your issues under control, don’t let them hide from you.

# BONUS: Meet Software Intelligence
After these practical steps, we need to talk about a new concept to overcome some difficulties.

DevOps toolchain of an organization includes many tools to manage, maintain, and operate all the engineering processes.
Therefore, *engineering managers* should log in to many different tools, find their projects/teams, get relevant metrics of the projects/teams, and **map them all in their brains** to see the health and efficiency of their software and teams.

![DevOps Tools](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/mcf7ti7wzyfxxhwjb967.png)

At this point, software intelligence is here for you. **Software intelligence** provides a complete platform to **take control of software quality**, **identify bottlenecks** of the entire development process, and **produce actionable metrics** to help you improve your software and team performance.

All the tools you use, all the analysis you perform in DevOps, help you get **a deeper level of software intelligence**. And **software intelligence helps you** get rid of **misinformation** and **disinformation** about your product development process.

**[QA Dashboard](https://dashboard.qa/)** -a brand new software intelligence platform- helps organizations **deliver faster, high-quality products** by connecting their own SDLC/ALM tools. QA Dashboard enables **real-time monitoring** of the entire software development life cycle and analyzes coding activities **to measure developer productivity**.

By enabling QA Dashboard, you get **complete visibility** into your **software health** and **development efficiency** in a single platform.

Accessing **real-time data** and **insights** on developers, teams, and products **makes you more confident in taking actions** on product development and engineering processes.

### **Let The Power Be With You**
If you want to build a **high-performing technology organization**, it’s time to **meet software intelligence** with QA Dashboard.

You can learn more about the product, schedule a demo, or see the live demo by visiting QA Dashboard’s website: [https://dashboard.qa](https://dashboard.qa/)