A Prominent Financial Services Company
Our client is a medium-sized corporate in the financial services industry. A Big Four consultancy had conducted a development project that had gone off the rails. JFDI was called in to provide an independent expert evaluation of just how bad the damage was and what it would take to put it right.
“JFDI provided a thorough examination of everything that had been produced and a professional evaluation of each part. We were left with a clear path forward as well as the ammunition we needed to pursue a satisfactory outcome from what was otherwise an adversarial us-and-them situation at a complete impasse.”CTO
Technical Due Diligence Consultancy for a prominent financial services company
Our client had adopted a new low-code technology on advisement from a Big Four consultancy and had their developers create a small, simple pilot system intended to be the first of many to clear a backlog of unfulfilled requirements in IT systems. The project started, a team of business analysts worked on collecting user requirements, then the developers started work, and users began to use the system as it was developed. After nearly £3M expenditure, it was clear the unfinished system had severe flaws and that the project was running out of control. A growing catalogue of user bug reports hinted that there might be several severe structural issues. JFDI was called in to review the project and evaluate what had gone wrong.
JFDI’s Approach
JFDI’s consultants obtained a copy of the entire code base, frozen at the point of the developers’ exit. We collated an extensive table of complexity metrics for each code module to prioritise those modules requiring closer examination. We looked at user bug reports that could indicate performance bottlenecks or structural problems.
The Findings
1. Business Analysis & Documentation
We requested the outputs from the lengthy and manpower-hungry BA stage. The consultancy was not forthcoming with any documentation: no BA, no requirements, no system design, and no wireframes.
2. Code Quality
In a “low-code” development project consisting of several hundred thousand lines of code, we found many examples of divergence from vendor-published best practice, a lack of functional decomposition, and even hard-coding of special-case scenarios depending on specific database record IDs. There were hardly any code comments explaining why a particular methodology had been used.
3. Performance
The database was found to have no indices. Queries/stored procedures/views were plentiful but often unused. In many cases, processes would perform multiple whole-table scans, returning large data sets to the code where iterative processing would be performed on the data. We, therefore, discovered that performance could be significantly improved through better database design and algorithms.
4. Security
Although ostensibly the developers had followed vendor-established best practices in authentication and authorisation, one of the algorithms adopted in their code had opened up vulnerabilities to attacks such as code injection.
Client overview
Company:
A Prominent UK Financial Services Company
Country or Region:
United Kingdom
Industries:
Financial Services
Company Profile:
The company is a prominent Financial Services company, with no internal software development capability, and a considerable backlog of IT systems requirements to fulfil.
JFDI services provided
Services used:
- Technical Due Diligence Consultancy
Software:
- A leading low-code software platform
JFDI’s unique Technical Due Diligence Consultancy services
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