CodeScene

Pros

The possibility to connect the history of your code with business metrics that allows you to drive and push for increased speed as this is increasingly more important going forward.

Cons

The user interface could be more intuitive.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing CodeScene

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to CodeScene

Pros

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

Cons

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

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to CodeScene

Pros

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.

Cons

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.