Up to 50% of the total development effort is spent on understanding the system. How do engineers approach this problem? Mostly ad-hoc. In other words, half of the budget is spent in an uncontrolled manner.

What do I mean by ad-hoc? The preferred solution is code reading. It provides custom feedback, but it does not scale due to its manual nature. The other solution consists of using off-the-shelf reporting tools. They are automatic, but typically they have limited impact on decision making because they are too generic.

What is the solution? First, assessment must be recognized explicitly as an activity during the development process. Second, the ability of crafting custom but automatic assessment solutions must be embedded in the development effort. I call this humane assessment because it fits our human abilities.

I help companies to adopt this approach. To make it practical I use the Moose analysis platform.