Have you considered doing a code and UX audit? If you’re preparing for a code upgrade, expect that your business will scale rapidly in the near future, or are worried about performance speed, such an audit can be a big help. Let’s take a look at who this service is for and what benefits it can bring.
When you should consider a code audit
- Have you notices a rising number of bugs appearing in your project as it’s developed?
- Do you want to check the quality of your app’s code?
- Is your product having performance issues?
- Do you want to prepare for scaling or a code upgrade?
If your answer to one or more of these questions is “yes”, a code audit may be just what your project needs.
At iRonin, we put a lot of emphasis on code quality and understanding business objectives. When we work on web or mobile applications, the experts on our team support our clients in building a bigger picture of every project. We actively look for code vulnerabilities and potential threats, identify areas to improve and prepare a list of recommendations and an action plan.
We do this because we know the costs of neglecting code quality. We’ve helped several clients over the years who came to us with badly written code. That is not a problem for us - it’s work we enjoy - but it can mean death to a project, particularly if the business behind it is just starting out, or undergoing a big change. That’s why performing a code audit and catching any issues quickly can be key for your success.
Diving deep into the app - the scope of a code audit
During a code audit, we focus on multiple layers of the application to build a meaningful view of the current state and provide rich and helpful feedback understandable by non-technical and technical users alike.
The scope:
- **General feedback** - a high-level overview and summary of the whole audit .
- **Suggested actions** - a list of suggestions with example solutions for issues that have the highest priority to keep the application secure, usable from the user perspective, and maintainable from the developer perspective.
- **Software architecture and database** - a list of actions that the application's maintainers should take if some parts of the structure need to be fixed.
- **Coding style** - a list of examples of code that need to be updated to keep the code readable, maintainable and extendable.
- **Security** - a list of identified security threats paired with suggestions on how they can be neutralized or mitigated.
- **Libraries** - a list of libraries that should be upgraded (e.g. due to security issues).
- **Business logic** - depending on the completion of process documentation for the application, we provide the result of inspecting essential code fragments affecting business logic. We also prepare a list of things that should be improved.
- **Test coverage** - a list of suggestions on how the test suite and coverage can be improved to cover more code and speed up the testing phase.
- **Performance** - a list of suggestions on how to improve the speed of the application.
Supporting business goals - the scope of a UX audit
- **Business goals & brand strategy** - an overview of business and product goals, which allows a better understanding of your current challenges and vision.
- **Behavioural data and metrics** - an analysis of existing data on users’ behaviors, including user recordings & quantitative data (e.g. Google Analytics). We also include an analysis of your user tracking setup, providing suggestions on how to improve data collection processes to get more actionable information.
- **User objectives & user journey map** - a list of user goals, with critical tasks represented as user stories. We map out the experience of users for their typical workflows.
- **Usability analysis** - an evaluation of the product’s usefulness and efficiency from the point of view of the potential user. We take user psychology and UX heuristics into consideration, and we map out pain-points.
- **Information architecture & UX writing** - an analysis of the structure of the data presented within the product, the information hierarchy, and the usefulness of the provided content as parts of the user interface.
- **Interaction design** - an analysis of specific parts of the UI, including forms, controls, and other UI elements. We assess the usability of chosen solutions.
- **Accessibility** - an analysis of the UI through the lens of various users. Through it, we make sure that the software is useful for people with disabilities/requiring special assistance, or in challenging use case scenarios (e.g. using a mobile app during a sunny day).
- **UX heuristics & visual design improvements** - reviewing the UI and visual design using the knowledge of UX principles and cognitive psychology for critical improvements.
The technologies we can check for you
So far, we have audited a number of technologies, listed below. We are very familiar with them and can be counted on to spot any problems in the code.
- Ruby,
- Ruby on Rails,
- JavaScript,
- Python,
- Django,
- PHP,
- Node.js,
- Haskell,
- Elixir,
- React,
- Angular,
- AWS.
There are more, such as specific JavaScript frameworks, for example. If your stack includes technologies that don’t appear on this list, we still recommend that you talk to us. We might be able to help.
Timeline - how long does an audit take?
There is no universal answer to this question. If your codebase is small, we’ll be able to look through it quickly. But if the project is large and complex, and especially if it includes legacy code, we might need to take longer. The timeline depends on the size of the application, how complete the documentation is, and the agreed scope of the audit. We can exclude some application layers, depending on the client's needs.
Results - why is it worth it to do a code audit?
At the end of the audit, the client receives a formatted document divided into the application layers that were inspected. It contains:
- Knowledge about the current state of the application in terms of performance, maintainability, and extendability;
- List of actionable items that can help plan the work and introduce improvements immediately;
- Feedback from an expert about the quality of work done in the project
We are also happy to organize a call to present the audit result and make clarifications if necessary.
Many of our clients have enjoyed these benefits over the years. We have helped companies such as: Acima, Bitt, XbyX, Marketer.Technologies, and ESBL Digital.
Are you worried about the quality of your app’s code? Use our code & UX audit service.
We will help you prepare for growth and scaling, offer actionable advice, and discover any existing issues.
