Legacy code from space

A software development company spun out of the Space Technology Centre at Dundee University is set to release its first product.

Rapid Quality Systems was founded in September 2009 and is based in the Business Incubator at the university. The company’s first product, ‘Code Rocket’, is aimed at making it easier to develop and analyse complex computer code.

The company’s chief executive is Russell Kay, a veteran of Dundee’s computer games industry, who has worked with Real Time Worlds and headed his own games company Visual Sciences, in the process helping develop classic games such as Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings.

Kay said: ‘We are working on software development tools that can be used right across the computing industry. With Code Rocket we have developed a tool that makes it much easier for people to analyse and document complex pieces of code, particularly what is known as “legacy code”.’

He added: ‘This is code that may have been in a system for some time and where the original programmer may long since have moved on. Code Rocket helps identify how that code works and what it does. We have developed this for the major programming languages being used across a whole host of disciplines, so the potential uses are widespread.’