The City of Cape Town achieves compliance to worldwide quality management standards

The City of Cape Town has achieved ISO 9001:2000 certification in its bid to ensure quality management of inhouse-developed business applications and increased customer satisfaction.

A key component of this compliance is an automated code checking solution that ensures adherence to best practices and quality standards.

“During application development, we use the Code Review module of Compuware’s DevPartner solution to ensure that all code adheres to our set of quality rules,” says Floris Kok, manager of the Microsoft .NET Competency Centre for the Business Applications (BA) section of the City of Cape Town’s Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) Directorate.

“We thereby ensure that we apply the correct .NET standards consistently at every stage of development,” he says.

The solution offers predefined code review rules, but also enables organisations to implement their own.

“Our ISO 9001:2000 Standards Committee sits regularly to ensure we follow best practices,” says Kok. “Our standards documentation is updated accordingly, as is our DevPartner database.”

“Code Review automatically checks every single line of code against all the rules in that database,” explains Catherine de Klerk, Compuware’s technical consultant. “A comprehensive report details any problems, along with suggestions as to what should be changed, and how. This would be impossible to achieve manually.”

Compliance to the worldwide ISO 9001:2000 standard is not mandatory for local government. Nonetheless, the City of Cape Town decided it should become certified as part of its bid for quality.

“We saw ISO 9001:2000 certification as a means of improving customer satisfaction by ensuring development of better quality systems,” says Kok.

The two-year compliance project kicked off in May 2004, and a large part of the focus was on changing the existing culture and mindset.

“Today, our application development projects only proceed to testing, QA and ultimately production once DevPartner has reviewed the initial coding and found it to be satisfactory. This is a non-negotiable part of the process.”

“DevPartner automatically detects and diagnoses software defects and performance problems early in the development process as cost-effectively as possible, providing built-in expert coding advice, coding standards and best practices to improve development skills and ensure software reliability and performance,” says de Klerk.