Checklist for Due Diligence of Software Firms

Due diligence covers financial, legal, product and organisation aspects of any change or merger project. Software aspects touch all of these, e.g. in

1. Revenue, its business model, such as SaaS, and development plus mantenance cost
2. IP rights, contracts, licensing
3. Product usability, quality, and serviceability
4. The brains behind a good software product, venture or backbone of any service or production business.

Software Aspects of Due Diligence

Our services in technical and software due diligence projects cover all aspects of product designs, including hardware and software. We collaborate within a larger consortium to provide specialized technical expertise. Our past projects span various industrial, such an Alford software, Hit tech, medical and pharmaceutical software, la equipment, biometrics, fintech, online media, hardware for media solutions, semiconductors, MEMS sensors, logistics solutions, industrial quality control, and food tech.

Key Areas of Focus

• Product Design: Includes product design documents, architectural descriptions, data models, software security scalability, API documentation, and usability assessments.
• Software Implementation: Covers code inventory, access to code repositories, technology stack descriptions, code quality metrics, performance metrics records of past issues, and technical debt description. 
• Operational Aspects: Encompasses intellectual property, developer contributions, licenses, product road mapping, software testing, build and release processes, end-user support, development support, operational metrics, infrastructure, audit reports, and records of past technology failures and security breaches.

Feel free to reach out for more details or to discuss your project setup and industry experience required. Please call to discuss.

Checklist for Due Diligence of Software Firms (excerpt)

Product Design and Software Architecture

1. Product design documents
2. Architectural descriptions; assessment of dependencies between GUI logic, and other important parts
3. Date model and DB structure
4. Software security and data protection concepts and design
5. Scalability and extensibility (effort of adding functions, applications, templates, UI elements, etc. in relation to initial effort)
6. API documentation
7. Usability assessment, customer feedback, and changes.

Software Implementation and Verification

1. Complete code, module, etc. inventory
2. Access to code repository with change logs
3. Description of technology stack used
4. Coders and quality
5. Performance metrics of top-5 bottleneck operations (response time, throughput, etc.)
6. Design of verification software and test strategy
7. Record of past design or product issues (bugs, automatic errors reporting, support call for fixes, customer field recalls, downtime, reworks, etc.)
8. Description of technical debt (eg., outstanding refactoring, end-of-life situations, scalability issues, etc.)

Operational Aspects

1. Intellectual property
2. List with short CVs of all developers with contributions to the product
3. Licensed/granted/sold tools, code, runtime, operating systems, components, methods, designs, etc.), dependencies, versions, Metime, and support such granted
4. Product road-mapping, specification, design, and continuous improvement process, history of past 
5. Software test process, status, results, and coverage over 5 years.
6. Software build, release, and maintenance process
7. End-user support process workflow, tools, chands), top-5, and history of five 5 years.
8. Development support is provided by suppliers, 3rd party developers, consultants, etc.
9. Operational metrics
10. Operational infrastructure covering all aspects relevant to customers, partners/suppliers, or regulatory bodies involved 
11. Audit, compliance, and certifications report legal commercial, operational/security, technical, etc.) 
12. The previous 3 years of material technology failures 
13. Previous 5 years of security breaches/Incidents/ Investigations

Check our services sections and case studies on due diligence for more information.