“Every company is a software company. The ability for engineering teams to deliver high-quality software at velocity is the difference between companies that gain a competitive edge versus those that fall behind.”— Barry Morris, CEO, Undo”
Improve Security and Quality with a c2m Source Code Assessment
Arguably, modern software applications should implement the promised functionality while delivering reliability at cost savings. Moreover, tools should not raise application security and license compliance concerns. Developers need time for creative work, like writing apps, and not being bogged down with quality and security concerns.
But few tools on the market today solve all of these issues. In this post, we will examine how one integration can deliver on these promises.
Ensure quality in source code
Quality source code accurately implements the functional specifications of the product, satisfies the non-functional requirements, ensures consumer satisfaction, minimizes security and legal risks, and can be affordably maintained and extended. Thus, quality is critical no matter the use case.
Use Case 1: Technical Due Diligence
The investors (internal or external), the buyers, or the potential partners will deep dive into the used tech stack to gain a personal understanding of the potential and the implied risks before moving forward. Any finding will allow:
- the investors to ask for additional guarantees; and/or
- the buyers request an acquisition price reduction
Use Case 2: External Audit
The external auditor and regulators will analyze:
- the software exposure to application security vulnerabilities; and
- the compliance with the open source and commercial software license regulations.
Discovered violations will pone pandora’s box for heavy fines and will set company’s reputation on risk
Use Case 3: Internal Audit
Any interested stakeholders will require an in-depth analysis of the technology and product processes used by a development department before offering funding. They will seek to ensure that their investment is secure and promising.
Extensive and recurring violations of best development practices, and misalignment of development teams with product quality needs, can lead to:
- management changes;
- development team restructuring or development outsourcing; and
- a quick death for versions or products.
Mitigate risk holistically (how to be safe, not sorry)
Despite the risks, quality assurance in software development is often treated piecemeal. It is characterized by a reactive approach rather than the proactive one taken in other industries. The ownership of source code quality is contested
[1] when it should be viewed as the collective responsibility of different functions. Teams responsible for QA testing, application security, and license compliance often work in silos using tools that have been designed to: (a) solve one part of the problem, and (b) evaluate a few of the non-functional or functional requirements. Management must view quality as an impactful feature rather than as overhead. Executives should pay attention to the quality state and invest in it. Engineering teams should resist treating code-cleaning as a “hot potato.”
Compounding these delegation challenges is the fact that existing methodologies and tools fail to address the issue of code quality as a whole. The use of continuous integration/continuous delivery methodologies reduces the impact of low-quality code, but unless CI/CD is based on a thorough and holistic quality analysis, it cannot effectively anticipate and address most hazards.
Focus on quality, simplification, and actionable reports for every stakeholder
CodeWeTrust’s c2m enables AI-driven technical due diligence for software products in order to identify the main pain points in source code. c2m is a powerful and fully automated, dockerized solution that can be executed on a local server or in a cloud environment, eliminating the need to upload code to 3rd party cloud spaces, and thus preserving the code’s intellectual property.
- Tech Stack
- Code Risks
- Static Code Analysis
- Security Review
- License Compliance
- Linked libraries version inspection
- Contributors Overview/Stats
- Business Risks
All popular programming languages are supported (JavaScript, Python, Java, C#, C++, Rust, Go, etc).
Unlike other approaches, c2m considers each step of the analysis as part of an iterative process. The intermediate results are stored in a knowledge base (KB) and used in the next steps of the assessment. This is an integral part of the process and perhaps the most significant drawback of other tools currently available on the market. C2 offers a configurable set of logic rules that automates, filters the findings, and unifies the reports. Leveraging a knowledge base derived from the analysis of a vast set of modern codebases and state-of-the-art advanced AI explainability (see example below),
we compile comprehensive reports, customizable to the needs of each different stakeholder. ExecutiveReportSample.pptx. (Additional examples can be found at
codewetrust.com/test-cases)
In the example below, c2m analyzes the libraries linked on a particular codebase by considering the aging and the application security. Each library that is seriously outdated or poses security vulnerabilities should be replaced. Even though this seems obvious, it cannot be automatically concluded unless you consider two sources of information (code parsing tools SCA and Static Security Analysis). This is the point where the majority of alternative methods (tools) fail.
Repetition is the Architect of Accomplishment
The
c2m Automated Source Code Quality Assessment doesn’t need to be, and in fact shouldn’t be, a one-time process. Measuring and monitoring software quality should happen continuously throughout the SDLC. The full eight-steps c2m evaluation should be conducted periodically, with quality improvement efforts beginning immediately following each analysis. The faster a new risk point is identified, the cheaper the remedy and the more limited the fallout. Making source code quality evaluation central to the product development process focuses teams, aligns stakeholders, mitigates risks, and gives a product its very best chance at success—and that’s every developer’s business.
Advantages
- One tool vs. many toolsThe investor can implement a solid technical due diligence process using only one tool. This makes it affordable for investors as well as internal and external, technical and business stakeholders.
- Open source vs. centralized approach. Our open design is based on state-of-the-art open frameworks ensuring scalability and adaptability to regulations and threat changes.
- Blind audit vs. 3rd party professional services. The investor can execute the complete process on its premises ensuring confidentiality of the results and preserving the software product’s intellectual property.
- One shot analysis vs. repetitive process. The vast majority of TDD processes are managed by professional services (performed by internal or external teams). This is a very time consuming process with high complexity and bureaucracy. Rarely is the process repeatable. Any dispute causes delays risking the investment deal. CodeWeTrust offers a fully repeatable and transparent process delivering indisputable results.
The newest release of c2m 4.2 includes these new features:
- One tool vs. many toolsThe investor can implement a solid technical due diligence process using only one tool. This makes it affordable for investors as well as internal and external, technical and business stakeholders.
- Auto generated executive (c-level) report. The reports are offered in three different layers of abstraction: Executive Report, Software Asset Management Level, and Developer Level (Code Viewer is included, too!).
- Easy administration of the complete process, compiling detailed reports of the findings for each step of the process.
- Build-in shareability administration.
- Easy deployment on a personal computer (i7/16GB RAM or better) or a cloud server (script installer)..
- Fast evaluation, taking less than 2 hours to complete, assuming an average codebase size smaller than 10M LOC (ten millions lines of code).
- JIRA integration
- Configuration and adaptation to the company development standards (no programming required).
- Support for most modern tech stacks and programming languages (more than 95% of the GIT code).
[1] https://www.infoq.com/articles/who-quality-software-development/
