CodeScene Pricing, Features, Reviews and Alternatives

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 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.

The visualisation and prioritisation of code helps teams understand the magnitude of the task before them and guides them on how to choose where to start.

Sometimes the user interface is not the most intuitive. Also, pervious versions lacked tools for easy imports for large organisations.

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...

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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.

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.