These are difficult times for many organizations.
CodeScene wants to help small businesses keep tabs on their teams and their codebases while they weather the storm. Starting today, we are offering CodeScene for free to small businesses as a way to support remote work. The offer is valid over the next two months, May and June.
All you have to do is either:
- Follow us on LinkedIn and comment on our post announcing this offer.
- Or head over to our tweet announcing this, help us reach others by re-tweeting or liking it, and send us a DM.
We will then respond with a coupon that gives you free access to our Small plan on codescene.io, which normally costs 99€/month.
Is CodeScene really Free as in Beer now?
Yes, the Small plan is entirely free over the next two months for new users and includes up to 10 developers per account. You can downgrade to a free account at any time, and we will send out a reminder in May. It’s a limited offer, though, so first come, first served; CodeScene is a bootstrapped startup, so our server budget for free accounts is limited. But we will do what we can to support others and the community.
And, by the way, if you are a larger company, you can still benefit from this offer and use the coupon to get a 99€ discount on any CodeScene plan over the next two months.
What CodeScene Features are most useful to a Small Biz?
CodeScene is developed by a distributed team, and we use the tool ourselves to coordinate and supervise our development hotspots; a small team cannot really afford much technical debt.
Using CodeScene, a team gets situational awareness of how their system evolves and powerful quality gates to supervise hotspots:
Prioritized hotspots have high development activity and a declining code health.
Hotspots are the parts of your code that are most likely to impact development and maintenance costs. Together with CodeScene’s Code Health analysis, you get a quick assessment of how healthy your code is, as well as trends highlighting the direction your code is moving in; does it get better or worse over time?
Actionable Analysis Results via GitHub Checks
The CodeScene dashboards are a good starting point, and we recommend that you inspect the results regularly to catch system-level trends. However, to make the information actionable and easily accessible, the information has to be pushed to the developers. This is where CodeScene’s pull request integration comes in; all hotspots are continuously supervised via GitHub checks:
CodeScene’s quality gate triggers in a GitHub check on code health decline.
That way, CodeScene acts as a (soft) quality gate during development. If a hotspot declines in health, CodeScene detects it and informs via the checks. This means that you don’t have to change anything in your existing developer workflow; CodeScene pushes the information to your team. Should you need more info, then you can always turn to the CodeScene UI and inspect the specific hotspot.
Support Retrospectives
Supervising hotspots and visualizing the development are the core use cases for a smaller team. In addition, the CodeScene dashboard and the hotspot visualization are great to present in a team retrospective. At that point, all stories and issues you worked on are fresh in everyone’s head, and you can now see the impact on your code in an accessible way.
Coordinate and On-Board using CodeScene’s Knowledge Maps
To a small team, 10-15 persons, CodeScene’s organizational analyses are of limited use; those analyses tend to grow in importance if the organization scales up. However, there’s one notable exception. CodeScene auto-generates maps over the knowledge distribution in your codebase. This is useful to support communication and on-boarding in a distributed team. Using the knowledge maps, you know who to ping on Slack.
A knowledge map identifies the main developer of each module. In the map, each developer is assigned a color corresponding to the code they've written.
Get Started and More Information
This blog post has really just scratched the surface of CodeScene. A good next step is to read more about prioritizing technical debt and how you use CodeScene’s predictive analytics to identify future issues before the offending code is even written.
We’re looking forward to welcoming you to CodeScene – your code is worth it!
