• How maintainable is our system?
• Are we using construction and design best practices been used?
• Will the quality of the design and code support the desired release date?
• Will the system scale to meet your increasing user needs, data volume, or other changing business requirements?

• Code Reviews - Reviewing your product or system to ensure the design and code quality will support your business objectives
• Technical Due Diligence - Analyzing a potential acquisition and summarizing the quality of the system and development practices used to build it
• Project Assessment - Evaluating the development practices used on the project and providing recommendations on changes that will increase your development speed, improve product quality, or otherwise meet your business objectives

Construction Practices Review
Development predictability and efficiency require strong construction practices. Our Construction Practices Review evaluates your development practices and identifies the specific software best practices that will help you achieve your objectives. Maxsam Partners can help in ways including:

• Identify current practices that are undermining business goals
• Identify new practices that would better support business goals
• Review design quality
• Assess code quality
• Recommend more efficient development practices, resulting in shorter release cycles and higher quality products
• Streamline configuration management to better support development of multiple versions and product releases
• We will work with you to understand your business objectives. We will then assess your construction practices through interviewing key personnel and reviewing existing project artifacts.
• At the conclusion of our Construction Practices Review, Maxsam Partners will provide a report identifying the current strengths and weaknesses of your organization and our specific recommendations for how you can better achieve your business goals through more effective software construction practices.

Technology Selection
Is C++ the best language for our system? Should we use .NET? Does it make sense to use a COTS application? Our broad experience and expertise in custom software development makes us uniquely qualified to answer technology selection questions. We'll help you perform a business-based evaluation of technologies and products to select the best fit for your needs. Some of the issues to consider when evaluating a technology, platform, language, or product are:

• Can we achieve the desired functionality with it?
• Does it support our performance and robustness needs?
• Does it support our usability and/or maintainability needs?
• What platforms will our system run on?
• Can updates be obtained in a timely manner?
• What is the vendor's track record for support and enhancements?
• Maxsam Partners experts will help you evaluate products and technologies from a technical and business perspective to ensure it meets your short and long term goals.

Software Due Diligence
Acquiring a company or product is a significant undertaking. Solid software due diligence uncovers risks and provides insight into whether the software and/or development organization you are buying will meet your business goals. Maxsam Partners provides independent evaluations of code, design, technology, and capability tailored to your business goals. Using a combination of automated tools, visual code inspection, and interviews with the technical team we quickly provide the information you need to make a sound business decision. Some of the ways that Maxsam Partners has helped companies perform due diligence include design and architecture reviews and software code quality assessments. Architecture and Design Review analyzes the system architecture, technology, designs, and code to identify strengths, weaknesses, and risks to your business goals. Our experts engage with your team to ensure we understand your concerns and provide key information as early as possible. Commonly addressed topics include:

• Providing an overview of the key physical and logical views of the system
• Identifying scalability risks and architectural strengths that support scalability
• Providing insight into the sophistication and robustness of internal algorithms and data models
• Characterizing the effort required to modify the system to support new functionality
• Clarifying the level and extent of internationalization support
• Identifying security and privacy risks
• Answering specific questions about the software/system’s architecture
• Code Quality Assessment characterizes the software/system’s size, maintainability, and defect history. Our analysis provides quantitative measures that reveal:
  
  • The understandability of detailed design and code
  • The use of good coding practices, including factoring, abstraction, commenting, naming, coupling, cohesion, consistency, etc.
  • The use of secure coding practices including buffer management and string handling
  • Risks to internationalization, portability, or other specific questions
  • Size and complexity of functional modules
  • The appropriate use of language features
  • We have significant software due diligence experience and are experienced in a wide array of target platforms (including Windows, Linux, and embedded software) and many languages and technologies.