Ruby on Rails Quality Audits

Sooner or later every company with a Rails application asks the same question: how good is our code, really? Maybe a new CTO has just joined, the original developers have left, an agency is handing the project over, or you are about to invest in a product and want to know what you are buying. A quality audit gives you an independent answer.

When an audit makes sense

• Taking over an application from an agency or a previous team
• Before a larger investment, acquisition or rewrite decision
• When features take longer and longer and nobody can say exactly why
• When bugs keep coming back after they were fixed
• Before planning an upgrade or a larger migration

What we look at

Codebase

• Overall structure and how closely it follows Rails conventions
• Complexity hotspots: the files that are both complicated and changed often
• Duplicated logic, dead code and unused routes
• Consistency of style, enforced by RuboCop or not at all

Tests

• Coverage of the parts of the application that matter most to the business
• Speed and reliability of the test suite, including flaky tests
• Whether tests check behaviour or just mirror the implementation - see our approach to Test Driven Development

Dependencies and versions

• Ruby, Rails and gem versions, and how far they are from supported releases
• Abandoned gems and gems that block future upgrades
• Known vulnerabilities - a deeper look is part of our security audits

Data and performance

• Database schema, constraints and data integrity
• Obvious performance risks such as N+1 queries and missing indices - for a deeper look, see performance analysis and database optimization

Delivery process

• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery setup
• Code review practice, branching and release process
• How long it takes a new developer to get the application running

What you get

• A written report with an overall assessment and findings ranked by risk and effort
• A prioritized list of recommendations - quick wins first, larger refactorings with a rough estimate
• A debrief call with your team to walk through the results and answer questions

Summary

A quality audit turns “the code feels messy” into a concrete list of what to fix, in which order, and what it will take. We know Rails applications of every age, from fresh projects to long-running legacy code, and we tell you honestly where yours stands. If you want help working through the results, our maintenance retainer is the natural next step.

Want an independent view of your Rails codebase? Get in touch.