Setting Standards in Digital Solutions

As Ethisys embark upon a new chapter in our digital journey, we have partnered with Super League netball champions Manchester Thunder. As a company with an ethos of setting the highest standard of excellence within our industry, our partnership with the most elite netball team in the UK is a perfect match.

In netball, results are black and white and the outcome is apparent; if a team plays poorly it’s visible for all to see. There is the old adage, ‘The league table doesn’t lie’. If things go wrong it’s easy for any viewer (netball familiar or not) to spot a misplaced pass, a missed shot at goal, or an unfavourable scoreline.

What about the performance of your digital implementation? You know when a sports team is performing poorly, but would you know when software isn’t working at optimal levels?

If the software product you have received has been written to poor standards of code – how do you measure performance unless you have a trained eye in the programming language with which the software is built?

Ethisys has worked on hundreds of implementations, and a theme has become apparent – every software solution we have inherited is built to poor standards; code that breaks conventions, and architecture that isn’t built to be reliable, reusable, or scalable. Just like a sports team, this then takes extra expenditure to put right and projects take longer than they should.

A poor performer can’t hide in sport, but they can in software (often behind a layer of technical jargon).

So, let’s give you some help in estimating whether you have a poorly built digital solution. Here are some obvious signs:

• Change time and reliability: If a change is made to the code, are many bugs introduced? Do the changes also take a long time?
• Is there frequent downtime on the production environment that cannot be accounted for?
• For testing purposes, is there an environment that matches production, with the same content?
• Do you receive notifications or alerts regarding the uptime/status of the solution?
• Deployments: Do you follow a release process that can be rolled back at the click of a button? Ideally these would follow semantic versioning and use deployment slots or blue/green deployments to reduce downtime.

These are some of the more obvious things to look out for. Unfortunately, unless you’re fluent in the development language, it is unlikely you will spot issues in the source code. These issues contribute to a poorly written solution, site vulnerabilities, and increased long term costs.

Ethisys are experts in evaluating digital quality and we’re here to help. Speak to us today for an audit of your software solution.