CodeScene 3.6: Visualize Team Coupling and Logical Dependencies in the Context of the Software Architecture

We’re proud to announce a new release of CodeScene, version 3.6!

CodeScene 3.6 introduces a new visualization that lets you view the coupling between different development teams in the context of the software architecture. We have also expanded CodeScene’s REST API. Finally, most of the focus in this release is on simplifying the analysis configuration. In particular, the integration with Jira (and now Trello too) is much improved. This makes it straightforward to connect to Jira or Trello and reap the benefits of CodeScene’s cost analyses.

New Features

• Visualize change coupling across service- and team boundaries: CodeScene 3.6 introduces change coupling overlays that let you visualize logical dependencies that cross sub-system/service boundaries, or dependencies that cross organizational team boundaries.

Visualizing change coupling across microservices (example from Spinnaker).

Visualizing logical dependencies across team boundaries (example from Spinnaker).

• Present a breakdown of the Delivery Effectiveness to a team level: Previous versions of CodeScene already included a Brooks’s Law analysis, which lets you visualize potential scaling effects as the organization grows. In this new version, that trend is broken down to the team level:

Measure rends in development output for each team.

• Provide Status Badges that can be embedded in README files: Status badges allow your teams to keep an eye on the health of their projects at a glance. They can be integrated into any tool that has network access to your CodeScene server, typically GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket.

Status badges allow your teams to keep an eye on the health of their projects at a glance.

• Import an Analysis Configuration via REST: CodeScene’s REST API has been expanded to allow a project configuration to be imported. This makes it easier to manage large CodeScene configurations at scale.

• Integrate with Trello to calculate Development Costs: In addition to CodeScene’s existing Jira integration, we now support a Trello integration too. Integrating with Trello (or Jira) lets you reason about the technical and organizational findings from a financial perspective. For example, how much time do you spend on defects in your top hotspots? What amount of work is unplanned? And what happens over time?

CodeScene calculates cost trends on a file-, architecture-, and system-level.

• Support for analyzing Git Submodules: CodeScene can now manage and analyze Git repositories that contain submodules.

• Full Scan Delta Analysis: CodeScene integrates into pull requests and CI/CD pipelines to provide feedback and, optionally, to act as a quality gate. Previous version limited the quality gates to hotspots. In this new version, CodeScene can supervise any piece of code.

• Code Health support for Clojure and Elixir: CodeScene 3.6 introduces full support for the Clojure and Elixir programming languages.

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Auto-fetch Jira and Trello configuration options. No longer any need to specify issue types and fields manually.
• Improved Jira validation; all fields are checked against the actual Jira instance.
• Present analysis warnings in the UI, including a detailed diagnostics log.
• Auto-detect author aliases via shared e-mails and offer to auto-resolve them.
• Remove obsolete REST API endpoints.
• Let the defect trend in the virtual code review cover the full hotspot analysis period, not just one year.
• Add the high-level project metrics to the REST API endpoint for project status.
• Use the configured “Cost Unit” for Planned vs Unplanned work too.
• Handle differences in upper/lower case for Jira issues.
• Optimize the analysis time via faster Git mining (significant improvement on large codebases).
• Minor bug fixes and improvements.

We hope you will enjoy these new features as much as we do! Remember that you can read more about CodeScene here.