CodeScene: Technical Debt Management Tool (BYOL)

What do you like best about the product?

CodeScene's metrics focus on the code quality in terms of reading, understanding and maintaining instead of technical details. It doesn't just analyze the code and aggregate data, it also interpretes the data and provides valuable insights.
The delta analyses and IDE intgrations provide immediate feedback for the developers.
The customer support is fast and helpful.

What do you dislike about the product?

It takes some time to understand the different analyses in depths and dense visualizations (the documentation helps). Sometimes it's not immediately clear how some of the aggregations are calculated.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It provides immediate feedback to the developers about the readability of the code.
It provides valuable metrics for technical leads and management about the overall quality of the project and the efficiency of the development process.

What do you like best about the product?

There are multiple quality characteristics (see ISO 25000 or the Heuristic Test Strategy Model) but the Maintainability-characteristic has always been a sore spot for me: Very important but difficult to test. Using Codescene I've gotten an excellent overview of the code health (the code quality so to speak) and helps setting targets.

The Pull Request reviews are especially fantastic and works as an additional senior code reviewer that reviews every piece of code that comes into the main or develop branches for all teams. This feature alone makes it possible for me to guarantee maintainability of all new code up to a certain level. For the pilot team we measured roughly a frequency of a couple of pull request analysis per day for a development team of 6-7 people.

As a Test and Quality manager it is perfect to get an overview and the developers in the teams feel that it helps them produce better code. It also helps teams do better describe the cost benefit of increasing code health/quality by spending time on refactoring certain hotspots, a benefit that can be tricky to explain to stakeholders lacking development expertise.

All in all my expectation on this tool is that the maintenance cost of our development lifecycle will decrease by a substantial degree in the future.

I had to set the server up by myself but the fast deployment using Docker was great. The software also works with common authentication methods which made it easy to connect to the software I wanted it to pull information from.

The customer support has been good, I've had a contact that replied in a quick manner and this helped us delpoy Codescene rahter quickly.

What do you dislike about the product?

The downsides so far has been few, but there are some features that are difficult to use when you work with an organization where opening firewall ports or working with proxies are a challenge. There is for example an excellent integration with Azure DevOps for automatic code reviews, but if you Azure DevOps instance is on the outside of the network where Codescene is running they cannot connect without proxy or opening a firewall port. This can be handled by using local Azure DevOps agents running that can call the Codescene API, but some features such as counting the number of analyzed PR's are then not activated.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The main challenge was how to address the Maintainability quality characteristic. For functional suitability we can perform testing and use test automation (such as unit-test up to system test) to secure that characteristic. Using Codescene we can now describe the Maintainability of the code.
We also have a challenge with code delivered by external parties and sometimes we have seen that their code lives up to the acceptance criteria but is not very maintainable and not written for maintainability (spaghetti code so to speak) . Using Codescene we can now add an additional criteria that is easily explainable and understandable and in that way we can guarantee the Maintainability of incoming code to a certain degree.

What do you like best about the product?

CodeScene is straightforward to set up and configure, making it easy to get started. The visualizations are excellent, and once you become familiar with navigating the tool, it is a true game changer both for developers prioritizing their work and communicating these priorities to business.
What makes CodeScene stand out in the jungle of solutions, are their dedication to the science behind good code health. I'm confident in the choices they make and the product baseline for code analysis.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main challenge we face with CodeScene is getting developers to incorporate it into their daily workflow. While there are several shift-left solutions available, such as the CLI and VS Code IDE, the absence of a Visual Studio IDE integration is a significant drawback for our team. We also find the lack of out-of-the-box configurations that integrate seamlessly with our CI/CD tools to be a limitation.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our team has a huge stack of legacy code with potential high maintenance technical debt, CodeScene help visualize this and promote a clear view of potential blockers. Also, the primary problem CodeScene is solving for our teams is declining code health in new solutions - with the Pull Request integration we can keep our code at a high standard from early on.

What do you like best about the product?

The product is really state of the start code "forensics". It really helps us realize where our technical debt is and also what we should do about it. What to prioritize first to have tyhe biggest impact on quality or to reduce risk. Big fan, have used it for years.
Support is really good too.

What do you dislike about the product?

No downsides per se, but I'd like a feature so I can track quality scores over time in a nice dashboard. I like big screens on the wall.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It's helping us mitigate our technical debt. That in turn will mean better time to market, better quality and happier developers

What do you like best about the product?

Help me write quality code, review code and help write good code

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing everything is good, while using codescene

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Writing better and quality code