Relevance, Inc., a leading Ruby on Rails software development practice specializing in application development, training, and consulting, today announced the launch of its Rails Audit service. This industry-first offering focuses on helping enterprise companies eliminate technical debt in Ruby applications.
The term technical debt, a common problem that makes its way into many software development projects, was first coined by industry thought leader Ward Cunningham. According to Stuart Halloway, CEO and co-founder of Relevance, “Applications built by cutting corners to save time sacrifices quality. By identifying technical debt that a project may have accrued, we are able to reverse the damage by re-architecting and rewriting the code to be more maintainable – eliminating future debt and ensuring valuable return on investment.”
“The audit isn’t just advice,” said Esther M. Orioli, CEO of Essi Systems, a leader in measurement and behavior change technologies. “While reviewing our application and development process, Relevance made a number of improvements on the spot.”
The Relevance audit team consists of senior Ruby on Rails professionals with strong backgrounds in agile methods, object modeling, and software testing. A customized quote is produced after members of the team meet with prospective clients to ascertain the scope of the project. A typical audit will cover the following areas:
Upon completion of each audit, Relevance provides the client with a detailed report summarizing the project's performance to date and offers suggestions for improvement. Taking it a step further, Relevance evaluates audited projects by comparing them to a cross section of similar development projects they have completed. Relevance typically completes an audit within one week of the initial meeting.
Added Orioli, “It was great to see how our project and team compared to other projects. Because Relevance tracks a variety of metrics, we were able to quickly identify what was unusual about our project.”
Relevance, Inc. is a leading Ruby on Rails enterprise application development practice, specializing in software development, consulting and training. Relevance’s staff of veteran application developers, who on average possess 13 years industry experience, ensures enterprise customers receive the highest quality standards for predictable, rapid application development. Relevance professionals have trained internal IT staffs at SAS, BBC, ThoughtWorks, AOL, IBM, Sun Microsystems and many other companies. The company has followed a proven agile methodology since its inception and actively contributes to the open source community via a wide range of projects and developer tools. Relevance was founded by veteran software developers Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland in 2003.