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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
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