Independent software assurance studio · Denmark, since 2021
We do not build your software. We measure whether it is sound.
Canine Development is an independent software assurance studio. We do not take development work. We build the open standard, the independent survey and the tools that turn "trust me" into something anyone can check.
We measure the code. Never the people behind it.
Why we exist
The source code is not the truth.
Most teams treat the codebase as the truth. It is not. The truth is the decisions: the domain, the rules, the architecture. Code is what those decisions became — and like any other product it drifts, decays and quietly stops telling the truth.
That gap between what the software was meant to do and what the code actually does is where defects, risk and carelessness live. Measuring that gap — in the open, the same way every time — is the whole job.
Independence
Independence is not something you declare. It is something you arrange your business around.
We measure software. For that measurement to be worth anything, we must not have an interest in what it shows. Here is how we built that into the business instead of promising it.
We give the yardstick away
The scale our products measure against is an open standard under Apache-2.0. Anyone can implement it, check it — or use it against us. We sell the measurement, not the right to measure.
We publish the method before the numbers
Our measurement method and its adjudication rules were published before a single result existed. A percentage whose definition can be chosen after you have seen the number is not a measurement.
We measure ourselves
Our own codebase is measured on the same scale as everyone else's, and the report is public. A tool that cannot survive its own treatment is not finished.
We never recommend a brand
We measure companies that use these tools. So we point at categories of tool, never at brands. We earn nothing from what you choose — and that is the point.
How we work
We have no opinions about your code. We have a discipline.
Everything we build and measure rests on the same engineering practice. It is not our own invention, and that is the point: a measurement has to rest on something practitioners already agree on.
Domain-driven design
Model the business, not the database.
Test- and behaviour-driven development
Prove the behaviour before you trust it.
Vertical slice and clean architecture
Boundaries that survive change.
Decisions as the source
Architecture and domain decisions are written down and kept alive, so the what and the why outlive any developer, any framework and any language model.
What we make
Four products.
Watchdog
An independent survey of a codebase, for the people who build software. The same scale every time, so it can be followed over time and put on the table in front of a customer or an auditor. You do not buy a house on the seller's word.
CAI
The open standard our products measure against. Free for anyone to use — including without us. It is the scale, not the tool, that makes a measurement comparable.
Assay
The same survey, written for the people who buy software rather than build it. For the decision where you have to vouch for something you cannot read yourself.
Unfold
Turns written-down business decisions into a codebase that obeys them. For the person who knows the business — not the framework.
Who we are
Half of us work in quality assurance. That is not an accident.
We are a small Danish team. When you sell measurements that others have to dare to trust, quality assurance cannot be something you get to last.
Jimmy
Founder. Direction, boundaries and the professional line.
Lasse
Customers and communication. Answers when you write.
Glenn
Documentation, support and quality assurance.
Alina
Testing and quality assurance.
How we got here
From consultancy to assurance.
- When
- What happened
- 2021
- Founded as a software and consulting house.
- Late summer 2025
- CodeHealth comes into being — what we now call Watchdog. We had been handed software built by outside developers whose quality we could not judge for ourselves, and no way to tell whether we had bought a pig in a poke. We had.
- Autumn 2025
- CodeCollie comes into being, later Scout and today Unfold. The idea is that in enterprise software a great deal about sound style and architecture can be settled up front, so the team can concentrate on the business.
- Winter 2025
- We stop taking development work. Canine becomes an independent software assurance studio. The first working Watchdog is ready — and we do not release it. It was as noisy as the tools we had set out to do better than, and it was not yet clear how wide a survey has to reach. A measuring tool you do not trust yourself is not a product.
- Spring 2026
- We build the corpus: 3,201 open source projects across 17 languages, which the engine is trained and checked against, and we expand from one language to thirteen.
- Summer 2026
- We pull CAI out of Watchdog and publish the measuring scale as an open standard under Apache-2.0. Shortly after we split the product itself in two: Watchdog for the people who build software, and Assay for the people who buy it. Those are two different questions, and they deserve two different answers.
The company
Canine Development ApS
CVR 42092134
Vestervej 26, 8500 Grenaa, Denmark
Founded 27 January 2021
Data and operations in the EU
Want to know where your software stands?
We answer ourselves. There is no sales department.