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Checklist: assessing the legal reliability of internally developed software

Develop in-house without compromising the compliance, traceability and legal value of your data.

A growing number of organisations are choosing to develop their own tools in order to gain agility and address specific business needs. However, internally developed software can quickly become a source of risk where it produces, processes or retains data with legal value.

How can you demonstrate the integrity of the data generated? How can you prove the origin of the developments carried out? How can you ensure the software’s ongoing regulatory compliance?

To help you assess the strength of your practices, Evidency provides a free checklist enabling you to identify the main points requiring attention before internally developed software is put into production. This resource is intended for product, technical, legal and compliance teams wishing to secure their developments and strengthen their ability to produce reliable evidence in the event of an audit, inspection or dispute.

This self-assessment checklist allows you to measure the legal reliability of your software across four key dimensions:

  • Development traceability: version management, archiving of commits, qualified timestamping and the creation of an evidential file that can be relied upon.
  • Traceability of human intervention: attribution of modifications, retention of specifications, archiving of key decisions and prompts used in AI-assisted developments.
  • Regulatory compliance: consideration of applicable requirements (GDPR, eIDAS, DORA, employment law, etc.) from the design stage and throughout the software lifecycle.
  • Use of a trusted third party: mechanisms enabling the integrity of the data produced to be demonstrated and its evidential value to be secured.

Each point is classified according to its level of risk, enabling you to identify quickly the legal risks requiring priority corrective action. You therefore gain a clear view of the safeguards to be put in place to align your internal software with the standards expected of a professional software publisher.