Escrow and Software Quality

The Escrow service consists of a deposit of source code, other design documents and procedures at a third party’s premises in order to guarantee a customer against a default risk of its provider. The Escrow contract defines the conditions for a possible release of the deposit to the customer (typically a bankruptcy, company buyout or a support failure of the provider).
A client may require a source code Escrow if the envisioned product is strategic for its activities and/or if the provider cannot offer sufficient guarantees about its support capabilities or its financial health.

As an independent research centre and a non profit organization, CETIC is recognised as an technical expert in embedded systems and also as a trustworthy escrow agent by customers and providers; it protects the Intellectual Property of the provider and gives accurate information to the customer about the usability of the deposit.

  • Review software architecture of distributed systems
    • Documentation based on the 4+1 View paradigm
    • Advise on software architecture to achieve targeted scalability, to ease software evolution through modularity, and to enable migration to "as a service" in the Cloud
  • Assist with scalability testing - develop stress tests for the selected testing tool (with the possible side effect to assist with the automation of acceptance testing)
  • Static analysis of source code quality (technical debt, evaluation against standard or custom software quality models)