CodeScene Reviews & Product Details

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.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The wide range of features, from technical debt management to behavioral analysis, combined with smooth CI/CD integration, makes it a versatile tool. The ease of integration with our CI/CD pipeline and the depth of code analysis provided are standout features. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While the tool is feature-rich, it can be overwhelming at first, and occasional tweaks are needed for more customized analysis. The frequency of use also depends on the project size, which might limit its perceived value for smaller teams. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

CodeScene is great for visualizing code quality, spotting technical debt, and helping teams focus on the most important improvements. Its visual reports make it easy to understand complex codebases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

CodeScene can sometimes feel overwhelming due to its complex interface and the amount of data it provides, which might make it hard for teams to quickly find actionable insights. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This is a good platform for comprehensive code health analysis, behavioral code analysis, risk prediction and hotspot detection and the best part is automated reports with actions Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The learning curve in the platform and the pricing are the parts which dislikes me most. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

CodeScene is good at picking up code smells and the VSCode extension makes it really easy to use and pick up code smells before they make it to version control. CodeScene offer a UI that provides a whole host of stats and metrics on our code, such as commit frequencies, knowledge distribution, code health scores along with which files are problematic and why, all of this makes it really simple to go in and improve our code. CodeScene is straightforward to get started with and offers version control PR integration where it can let us know if the code health is decreasing and how/where. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some of the rules set by CodeScene seem arbitrary and unnecessary, I know these can be customised to our needs but often code is dynamic. We have some APIs that are wrappers for a database or whatever which often get flagged by CodeScene but in reality, this API is probably fine for what it is. There are other examples for some of the rules CodeScene sets such as primitive obsession. Sure, you could maybe argue this is a wider problem but arbitrarily grouping primitive parameters into objects to increase our code health score doesn't feel correct. Lastly, a minor point about the UI, I would say the learning curve is somewhat steep. There are a lot of tabs, metrics and graphs which can be a bit overwhelming to navigate at first. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

On an organisation level, the data we've gathered helps our teams move forward in a better way by having additional information and signals to facilitate delivery.

From an engineering perspective, we can help identify team productivity bottlenecks and areas most expensive to maintain, support onboarding with knowledge maps of a system or domain, assist with off boarding by identifying the areas in need of knowledge transfer, help to maintain standards and more.

CodeScene can be deployed into a continuous integration pipeline and can integrate with a git repository to automatically analyse pull requests and identify high-risk commits. The analysis can help engineers who are less experienced with the code base review high impact code changes and catch potential problems before they are delivered to the main branch of the code base.

Identifying delivery risks before they become an issue if also a beneficial signal from a product engineering team perspective. A possible scenario involves a project that involves understanding and adapting an area which contains a lot of hotspots and complex code for a team built of mostly new engineers. Using these tools allows better visibility, questions and delivery estimates.

Having this real world information up-front from an onboarding perspective for a EM, HoE, VP and CTO role is also something not to be quickly dismissed.

We not only want to identify our technical debt, but help prioritise what should be fixed and track this over time. Or from a different angle, identify what we don't need to focus on fixing and instead accept our technical debt as the impact is low, therefore the value is likely low. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The interfaces can be a bit clunky at times, there is a level of onboarding needed in terms of where everything is and sadly, it does not integrate with our ticketing tool for delivery reporting (Linear). All quite minor things though. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Codescene not only provides detailed insights into code complexity, hotspots, and technical debt, helping teams identify areas that need refactoring but also can predict potential risks in the codebase. You can also identify knowledge silos and areas of code that might be at risk by using the tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Depending on the codebase and project, some sugestions are impossible to be applied so we need to supress a couple of improvement suggestions for the code. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As a React JS developer time, I need some quick logic as per previous code CodeScene very intelligently understands my code and previous code very well and generates code as I want, Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Other tools like ChatGpt its not understand my new requirements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.