Application audit and refactoring

For when your product needs fixing

Does your software impress or underdeliver? Are you sure of the quality of your code? If your app is slow and constantly crashing, or if your developers tell you they can’t introduce new features for fear of the app breaking down, it’s time for refactoring.

Refactoring is the process of rewriting existing code to improve the efficiency of underlying processes without changing the app’s external behavior. In other words – it fixes what’s broken that no-one can see. In order to uncover the issues you need an audit – a comprehensive review of the code that evaluates how secure, performant, and scalable it is.

Why would you need app refactoring?

Security

If an app audit reveals that there are vulnerabilities in your code, it’s a surefire sign that refactoring is coming your way. Security issues are a critical reason for rewriting your code, as not taking care of them may cause your customers to lose their most sensitive data – personal and financial information, or passwords. Such incidents naturally result in customers having lower trust in your service or even resigning from it, but they may also make you liable to legal consequences.

Performance

If you or your customers notice issues with performance – such as the app crashing or slowing down – it might be time for refactoring as well. This will help remove bottlenecks, optimize architecture and database queries, remove code duplicates, unnecessary computations and caching results, as well as update libraries and frameworks to the latest version. All of that will not change the external appearance of your app, but it will surely significantly improve its performance.

Scalability

An architecture that works for an MVP may not necessarily work for a successful product at scale. If your development team didn’t consider that, refactoring may be the only solution to efficiently handle increased amounts of workload or numbers of users. It will help you restructure the code in such a way as to introduce scalable solutions like stateless architecture, load balancing, microservices, concurrency, and parallelism, while the users will suffer no change to their experience.

Having issues with any of these?

We’re experts in application audit and refactoring and can help you improve the security, performance, and scalability of your software.

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This is how we do it

1. Code audit

Before we can change a single line of code, we must start with an application audit to assess its state. We check if the code satisfies current security best practices, then we measure whether the app meets performance SLAs, and finally we run load and stress tests to determine its scalability.

2. Issue identification

The audit should uncover issues and threats in three key areas: security, performance, and scalability. We can then prioritize them (as critical, major, medium, or minor), depending on their severity, and propose the best and the fastest solutions to address every one of them.

3. Change flow planning

Having a list of the problems and proposed solutions, we can come up with a roadmap of how to fix them. We carefully design a plan of action that allows us to both resolve critical issues first, as well as progress with fixes without having to make any major changes to other parts of the code.

4. Execution

Having come up with a plan, we’re ready to bring it to live. We work in sprints to progressively address all the issues from the list. Our goal here is to introduce fixes without regression, i.e. without making any changes to the app that would deteriorate user experience or impair any functionalities.

Does that apply to you?

Then we can help you identify issues with your app and professionally redesign it in a way that will delight your customers. Let’s schedule a call!

Let's talk!