CodeScene 3.5: Open APIs and more Predictive Capabilities

We’re proud to announce a new release of CodeScene, version 3.5!

CodeScene 3.5 comes with several improvements to the core analyses. We also introduce an open REST API for querying projects and hotspots.

This version also expands on CodeScene’s predictive capabilities with early warnings for code that is likely to degrade in Code Health. Using that feedback, you can plan mitigating goals via CodeScene’s work flow for managing technical debt and get it supervised in your delivery pipeline.

Speaking of delivery pipelines, we have also expanded our pull request integration to cover BitBucket on-prem as well as Gerrit’s patch sets.

New Features

• Warn for Hotspots that degrade in Code Health: Automatically detect degradations and view a list of code that declines in health.

• Predict Hotspots that are likely to degrade in Code Health: CodeScene’s sweet spot is to identify and prioritize technical debt by taking the social side of code into account. Over the past year we have worked to close the feedback loop even tighter so that any decline in code health is caught as early as possible, for example via a CI/CD pipeline. With this new CodeScene version, we add predictions of hotspots that are likely to decline in health. That way, an organization can do pro-active refactorings while they are still affordable. The feature is described in more detail on our blog.

The code health decline was predicted before it happened.

• An open REST API: The new REST API gives you access to the analysis information. Using this API, you can construct your own custom reports and/or integrate CodeScene into other tools. Initially, we just expose the hotspot information. We plan to expand the REST API in the next release, and any feedback and suggestions are welcome.

• Gerrit Integration for Code Reviews: Integrate CodeScene into your Gerrit review process via automated webhooks. That way, CodeScene will post an automated code review as well as a delivery risk prediction directly to your Gerrit instance.

• Augment the Cost Trends with Code Health Trends: A change in development cost could be due to a decline in code health. For this purpose, CodeScene adds technical code health info to all its cost trends.

View your development costs in the context of code health.

• Asynchronous Cloning of large Git Repositories: CodeScene now clones your Git repositories using an asynchronous process that avoids HTTP timeouts for long-running clone jobs.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• A bug fix for defect density calculations that used the sliding hotspot window.
• Let the UI highlight retrospective analyses so that they are easily distinguishable from full analyses.
• Add a dedicated Admin role to the user management.
• Bug fix for the Visual Basic parser.
• Present the relative effort in each hotspot on an architectural level.
• Automated re-calibration of supervised hotspot goals.
• Make the X-Ray overloading strategy configurable.
• Unify the rules for cyclomatic complexity with respect to function entry/exit points across languages.
• Make HTTP timeouts and page sizes configureable for the Jira plugin.
• Handle Azure on-prem URLs for webhooks.
• Minor bug fixes and improvements.

Get your license for CodeScene here.