Just recently I had the privilege of doing a formal analysis of the code base of the client using CodeScene. I spent two days analysing the code base of around 35 active developers. The company wanted to see if some of the difficulties they had could be better understood by looking at the code and more importantly by looking at the interaction patterns with the code. My peers were thrilled at the level of understanding they could acquire in such a short timespan! Not only does it give hope in showing that it's only a small fraction of the technical debt that actually counts, including which part! But it also gives valuable insights into concerns around the code, like team organisation, developer turnover and even product management difficulties. I've been using CodeScene for more than a year now. I'm a technical coach and as I get to see a lot of different teams. CodeScene really improves my understanding each team's situation and thus I can be of better use to them. Tools are only tools numbers are only numbers but when a tool is making the invisible visible then it is really, really useful for making more informed decisions!

Otherwise almost invisible information is pulled up right into our face The incredible insight it gives into the pain points of the project in a very short time. That it focuses on only the most costly problems It's focus is not only code, but also team dynamics, delivery dynamics and architecture. I don't know of other tools that look at Change Coupling Very visual

The UX is sometimes confusing, this is probably where there's most room for improvement.

CodeScene as a company has been highly responsive to my input over the whole course of my engagement with them. My suggestions based on real-world usage contributed to improvement in the products. Throughout my entire engagement, the CodeScene team has stayed highly engaged to make sure I was getting the most out of the product. Opening the tool for the first time was a truly exciting experience, and the more I learned, the more excited and empowered I got.

CodeScene gave me a view of the code base in a way that no other tool - or person - could. It helped me understand where our quality issues really came from, and to redirect my team to focus on remediating those areas. This not only improved quality but helped make sure we were focused on the most refactoring value.

There aren't a lot of downsides to this tool. The subject matter requires a lot of knowledge that takes time to attain. This is to say you have to understand the theory behind the insights to get the most value out of them. However, I'd argue that any engineering manager -should- understand this theory if they want to be effective at managing any code base. It shows up all the meaningful metrics I'd always hoped for and never knew existed.

CodeScene is one of the best visual tools to identify pull requests that leads to technical debts.

The most important thing about Codescene is that it allows the software development team to remove technical debts from the source code that can severely impact the performance of the software system later.

It was indeed quite difficult to remove all the technical debts all at once and when we use this tool our release frequency decreased.

Above all else, I appreciated that CodeScene would provide data to check my instincts about where and when to apply more effort to improve a design. As a developer, CodeScene’s hot spot feature helped me feel more confident (or helped me find another candidate) when I identified an area to improve. As a team manager, the metrics and graphs in CodeScene gave our team a way to monitor progress as we worked on a several week effort to make small, incremental improvements to a tricky area of code.

CodeScene gave us a new insight into a problematic area of our code - team structure. We identified a hotspot that continued to grow as we added new features. The Team Dynamics views highlighted an issue that kept the hotspot growing; several teams contributed equally to the code - a case of a missing shared mental model and lack of clear stewardship. The information generated by CodeScene helped us create a plan to improve the code and the visuals helped us tell a compelling story to our whole team. We used CodeScene on new projects to help us come up to speed on a new project quickly. We identified the hotspots to prioritize conversation topics with the original authors as we transitioned the code from one team to another. As we started making changes to the project, I appreciated the GitHub Pull Request integration that provided an extra check to see if we had missed changing some files that had historically changed together and might have caused a bug in production.

We used the hosted solution (codescene.io) which tended to lag the on-premises version and get the newest features later. We were unable to use some of the delivery-focused features as we used Pivotal Tracker and later Clubhouse, neither of which were supported at the time. The UI was sometimes hard to get a summary of the information we needed, though that has improved with the Hotspots Code Health view.

CodeScene prioritises the biggest bottlenecks in our projects. It finds the code improvements that give the biggest improvement in the development and maintenance of our codebases. We use CodeScene to XRAY our codebases quickly and improve the structure of our code and sometimes even the structure of our teams. We use it as a guide for work conversations and code / project reviews and to assess (external) codebases. The super easy setup, leading to detailed insights, led to explosive growth of the service within our company. We didn't have to put a lot of effort into the adoption; CodeScene sells itself.

Running an analysis with minimal configuration (the repository path and a branch) already gives a lot of insight. By fine-tuning the configuration and including external information from Gitlab and Jira (among others) the CodeScene analysis will provide even more insight. I love the ability to quickly zoom in and out from architecture level to code level and back again.

Although most developers really like the CodeScene perspective on their codebase, it's sometimes hard to follow up with improvements. With the integration into build pipelines, the code supervision functionality, the reports, monitors and the actionable improvement advice, this issue is mostly solved.