Software auditing process

A software audit is the internal or external review of  software program. These is used to check its quality, progress, standards, regulations etc. Many organizations uses the risk of being auditing. A comprehensive software audit examines not only license compliance, but also software utilization.  For many reasons, software audits may be conducted. Verifying licensing compliance, Monitoring for quality assurance (QA), Compliance with industry standards, Satisfying legal requirements etc are some of them. Internal audits can be useful for improving efficiency, catching inactive licenses that can be dropped and finding problems before they can become licensing or regulatory issues in a third-party review for the organization.

   Third-party review mainly focuses on software used beyond licensed rights, and external reviewers. It won’t usually care if some licenses are unused. These different priorities mean it is advisable for an organization inorder to conduct internal reviews prior to external audits. Software audits are often important. It is considered as one of the main thing to be required. However, audits can be disruptive to a company's development. And also it have a chance for causing financial strain on a project because of unbudgeted costs.

   Teams and management may be required to consult with auditors to ensure the process to complete and to be accurate. This can take away from time spent on work. Since time is important, organizations should refrain from overdoing audits. And executives should understand how, why and when audits are conducted so they can best prepare for them. An organization usually contracts with third-party reviewers and teams to provide independent verification of a software program’s compliance which include all the development plans, industry standards, best practices and legal practices.

  Compliance audits may focus on adherence to IEEE standards and also the legal regulatory compliance. This kind of audit focus is especially important in the case of software. Information technology use has increased dramatically in recent years. It produces multitude of information systems and underlying databases. The more number of users and implementations of this technology have generated terabytes of data. The data in which it is incomplete or inaccurate.

  There are  many other ways that an enhanced audit approach can improve audit effectiveness. One of it include the automation which reduces auditor effort while providing greater coverage through full population or targeted sampling testing. Remote auditing allows members of audit teams to be distributed geographically and  to take advantage of knowledge concentration. For more