About

Increase productivity and reduce software cost

Here is how we can help reduce software cost, technical support cost, business disruptions, and increase productivity in your organization, thereby increasing profitability.

With all the advancement in information technology, software troubleshooting tools, infrastructure hardware management tools, and development tools, why is there a high occurrence of low quality software solutions?

Impact to the U.S. Economy
The US Department of Commerce's, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s study in 2002 reported: “software bugs, or errors, are so prevalent and so detrimental that they cost the U.S. economy an estimated $59.5 billion annually”.  

With increase use of software technology, little to no attention is being paid to quality software development; the cost of poor quality software has increased.  Organizations contribute to poor software quality because they ignore key steps in the software development process and pursue fix targets (timelines or a predetermine release date).

Poor quality software creates unnecessary downtime for users and increase support cost.  It is possible to demonstrate how poor quality software can cost a company large amounts of money, while a high quality software can lower cost in the same time frame.  Additional incalculable cost of poor quality software is the impact to the delivery of services to the company’s clients.

A Logical Solution
Crystal Seed, LLC has identified the root causes and remedies for the prevalence of poor quality software that causes unnecessary business disruption.  Our founder is the author of the book titled “Common Software Development Mistakes made by Managers and Developers”, with a sub-title “Ways to eliminate poor quality software, business disruption and high technical support cost“.  

All persons involved in software development from user managers (information owners), technology managers, and developers are responsible for the outcome of software quality and they should all be involved in crafting the solutions for high quality outcomes.


Training to Increase Profits
All levels of personnel involved in the software development process should be trained to be quality conscientious, with content tailored to each particular audience.  Crystal Seed is the premier company in such training content.

Software failures, necessary evil or avoidable?

Code Review
The code review process is often overlooked, but it is a critical part of the development process that can prevent most poor quality software outcomes.  Imagine for a minute the quality of books if authors did not submit their books to editors and proof readers before going to press.  This is the equivalent of not having code reviews.  One might say software goes through quality assurance testing but quality assurance testing is only equivalent to reading the table of content of a book to make sure that all needed topics have been covered.

Code review is the most effective way for an organization to ensure high quality of its software.  Quality assurance testing is too late.  By the time most software reaches quality assurance testing, thousands or even millions of lines of code would have been written.  If the code contains repetitions, quality assurance testing can only catch the areas that were tested, leaving wrong or poorly written code un-remedied.  Most quality assurance tests focus primarily on specific business requirements and very rarely test the main factors that plague most software applications.  

Old Habits are hard to “Break”
In most cases if code reviews are completed within a development team the results can be ineffective or unproductive; hence it is often not done.  Co-workers may be sensitive to each other and unwilling to point out serious flaws in each other’s code.  Even worse, most reviewers do not know what to look for in reviewing another developer’s code.  They end up trying to ensure that business requirements are met, just like quality assurance testers.  Without a professional standard, each developer will review his or her peer’s code based on personal standard and style, which may itself be flawed.

Our Service
With Crystal Seed’s trained consultants, all code will be reviewed to topnotch professional standards.  Review can be done onsite or offsite.