Software Audit Checklist: Top Areas for Evaluating and Improving Your Solution

Software systems rarely fail overnight. They degrade quietly through accumulated decisions, deferred maintenance and process inefficiencies that remain invisible until they become expensive problems. A 2025 report found that 81% of respondents believed that poor software quality cost their company “between $500,000 and $5 million USD every year.” These figures translate to real operational costs, delayed market opportunities and engineering capacity diverted from innovation to addressing emergencies.

Yet code quality tells only part of the story. Inefficient development processes, unclear team responsibilities and inadequate documentation compound these costs further. For private equity firms evaluating acquisitions, these hidden liabilities directly affect valuation and post-acquisition performance. Read on to find out how companies can audit their software to avoid these problems.

Why do companies need to audit their software?

As products evolve and organizations scale, software that once worked well can become a limiting factor with time. A software audit allows companies to assess their solutions and verify whether they’re ready – not only for current needs, but also for future growth, increasing complexity and changing business goals.

One of the most important reasons for auditing software is scalability and future readiness. An audit helps identify architectural constraints, performance bottlenecks and inefficient resource usage that might not be visible during day-to-day development. It also highlights areas where optimization is needed to support expansion – e.g., by onboarding more users, entering new markets and integrating with additional external systems. An audit also provides more visibility into technical debt by identifying legacy solutions, quick fixes and outdated patterns that can significantly slow down development if left unaddressed.

Companies also audit their solutions to control development and maintenance costs. Poor code quality, unclear architecture or missing documentation can increase the time and effort required to introduce new features, fix bugs or onboard new team members. A software audit exposes these hidden costs and helps your team understand where development time is being wasted. By addressing the root causes early, organizations can reduce long-term maintenance expenses and make development more predictable and cost-effective.

Software audits play a critical role in investor due diligence. When evaluating a product they plan to invest in, stakeholders need a clear and objective understanding of the software’s condition, risks and long-term viability. An audit provides transparency into risk, dependencies and limitations, helping decision-makers assess value and stability of the solution they are about to invest in. In many cases, it can prevent unpleasant surprises from occurring late in the process when fixing issues or maintenance is significantly more expensive.

What happens when you don’t audit your software?

When software is not regularly audited, problems rarely appear all at once. Instead, they accumulate quietly and appear at the worst possible moment – after launch, during scaling or when a product is already used by customers. At that stage addressing issues becomes significantly more complex, risky and expensive.

One of the most common consequences is unplanned post-launch changes. Real-world usage can often uncover architectural flaws, poor design and hidden dependencies that weren’t caught in development. Fixing these issues after release often requires major refactoring or partial rewrites. These not only increase costs but also introduce additional risk, as introducing such modifications to production systems can lead to outages, regressions or missed business deadlines.

Lack of auditing also leads to usability issues that undermine user satisfaction. Without a structured review of workflows, UI consistency and user experience, products can become difficult to navigate or misaligned with user needs. Over time, even small usability flaws can translate into increased support requests.

Unaudited software can also be impacted by slow performance and inefficient resource usage. Undetected performance bottlenecks, redundant processes or not optimized components can consume excessive resources and engineering time. This results in higher operational costs, slower feature delivery and problems in scaling systems despite increased resources.

Additionally, without regular audits, companies often struggle with declining overall software quality and loss of trust, particularly among enterprise customers. Enterprise customers expect reliability, stability and transparency. Performance issues, incidents and unclear technical limitations can quickly reduce confidence and negatively affect long-term relationships. In competitive markets, a reputation for low-quality or unreliable software can be difficult to recover from. If you want to detect these issues early and ensure high software quality, our Software Audit Checklist provides you with a structured approach for evaluating your solution. It captures the essential questions our software audit experts ask during comprehensive audits, giving you a foundation for identifying potential risks and improvement opportunities.

What is the Software Audit Checklist?

The Software Audit Checklist is a structured set of questions designed to evaluate the quality of your software and development processes. It serves as a diagnostic tool that helps identify common problems before they escalate into costly issues.

Think of it as a preliminary quality check for your system. It won’t replace a comprehensive audit, but it will highlight areas that deserve deeper investigation. The checklist covers fundamental questions across key development aspects:

• Infrastructure and deployment – find operational risks and delivery bottlenecks,
• Architecture and design – identify structural limitations that affect maintainability and growth,
• Code quality and technical debt – reveal hidden costs embedded in your codebase,
• Team management and processes – examine your process maturity, which is essential for delivery speed and system reliability,
• User experience – make sure your solution meets not only technical requirements, but also user needs,
• Security and compliance – uncover security gaps and increase system safety.

Issues like unclear ownership, missing documentation, inconsistent deployment practices, and architectural drift appear in nearly every system we audit. The checklist targets these recurring patterns first and offers practical recommendations for your team to address these issues.

This checklist represents a condensed version of our methodology. Our full software audits cover over 500 individual assessment points, examining not just what exists but how it evolved and whether it’s fit for its purpose. The Software Audit Checklist distils this into essential questions that give you and your team a starting point for assessing overall solution health and development maturity.

Who can benefit from using the Software Audit Checklist?

The checklist is designed to support anyone responsible for the quality, performance or strategic direction of a software product. Different roles might find different sections particularly valuable, while still getting a holistic view of the entire solution.

CTOs and C-suite executives need visibility into technical risk without getting lost in implementation details. The checklist provides a structured way to assess whether engineering investments align with business objectives. Sections on architecture, scalability and technical debt help identify strategic risks that could affect growth, acquisitions and market positioning. For executives preparing for due diligence, the checklist offers a preview of what external auditors will examine.

Investors and acquirers evaluating software products need objective criteria for assessment. The checklist provides a framework for initial technical due diligence before committing to a deeper evaluation. It highlights the questions that matter most when assessing long-term viability and hidden liabilities.

Tech leads and engineering managers are closest to the daily reality of their systems but can benefit from an external perspective. The checklist helps them benchmark their practices against industry standards. Sections on deployment frequency, code quality and team processes reveal whether current approaches support sustainable delivery. It also provides language and structure for communicating technical concerns to non-technical stakeholders.

Product owners and product managers might not be responsible for technical decisions, but they feel their consequences. Slow delivery, unexpected bugs and scalability limitations all affect product roadmaps. The checklist helps product experts understand where technical constraints come from and identify conversations worth having with engineering teams. Sections on UX, documentation and process maturity are particularly relevant.

Evaluate your software using a proven audit methodology

A software audit is not just a technical exercise – it’s strategic tool. It helps organizations to ensure that their software can support growth and keep costs under control. During an acquisition process, it also supports investors and decision-makers in determining whether the software can scale with the business and be maintained efficiently.

If you want to audit your software methodically, but you’re not sure where to start, the Software Audit Checklist will give you an overview of key areas to examine. Created by our experts who regularly conduct comprehensive software audits, this document is a great tool for you and your team to analyze code, product alignment and process maturity. Download the Software Audit Checklist here.

FAQ

How do companies benefit from software audits?

Software audits enable companies to ensure high quality, performance, scalability, usability and maintainability of their solutions.

What issues can companies avoid by conducting a software audit?

By conducting a software audit, companies can identify bottlenecks, security gaps, architectural flaws, inefficiencies, poor design and usability issues early.

How does the Software Audit Checklist work?

The Software Audit Checklist provides you with key questions and recommendations you can use to evaluate and improve such software development areas as architecture, code quality, user experience and team management.

How can the Software Audit Checklist help engineering managers?

Team leads and engineering managers can use the Software Audit Checklist to compare their practices against industry standards and check if their processes support sustainable delivery.