Every software that's maintained over a certain time has potential for improvement - from bad performance, security issues or overly slow time-to-market or similar stuff.

This book helps you uncover problems and risks with your software and your development organization. You learn how to effectively and efficiently review your system, in breadth-first manner. We begin with defining clear and precise goals for your review, conducting a productive kick-off with important stakeholders. You get tips for stakeholder interviews and pragmatic qualitative analysis to find specific quality issues, like performance, flexibility, operability, security or understandability.

Then we walk down into the engine room of your system and look at the internals, like modularization, dependencies, code, technologies and cross-cutting concepts.

Next we analyze operational aspects - how your system is tested, released, deployed and operated. The book supports you to identify problems within your development organization, from unclear or missing requirements over communication issues within the development team over to documentation and version management.

Finally you learn how to prepare and communicate your result, to get the most out of your review. Look forward to an enjoyable and stimulating journey through the exciting world of software reviews.