Minimize On- and Off-Boarding Risks

CodeScene’s traditional usage as a project management tool is to detect areas of your codebase with excess costs. 

However, CodeScene has evolved to include powerful simulation features that help you plan on- and off-boardings by detecting organizational risks. In this article we explore how CodeScene combines social measures with technical metrics to detect future risks.

Project Planning with On- and Off-Boarding Simulations

Let’s say that a developer or contractor leaves your organization or is transferred to a different project. What’s the impact on your application? Are there any high risk areas where you might lose mastery, which in turn might lead to technical issues like defects and financial risks like delays and missed deadlines.

For this purpose, CodeScene comes with a simulation module that lets you explore the effects of a planned off-boarding while the developers are still aboard. This gives you the opportunity to identify off-boarding risks and areas of the code in need of a new main developer.

CodeScene project planning simulation lists all developers that actively contribute to the codebase. To simulate the impact of an off-boarding, select one or more developers from that list to the right in the next figure:

Select one or more developers to simulate the off-boarding effect.

The previous figure shows that the areas of the code affected by the off-boarding get highlighted in red. This is a good starting point to explore the impact, but CodeScene takes it a step further by auto-detecting high risk areas in the off-boarding simulation. That is, if a major hotspot with technical issues is in the head of a developer who might leave, we consider that an increased off-boarding risk:

CodeScene auto-detects off-boarding risks by combining technical and social information.

The preceding figure shows an example of a high risk off-boarding. We seem to lose control of the module Typers.scala, which CodeScene assigns a risk of D. That risk is based on CodeScene’s code scores which go from A to E, where A indicates code that is so simple that another developer can start working on it with low risk, whereas D and E indicate that there might be severe maintenance challenges in this code.

CodeScene project management software lets you detect this risk before it becomes an issue. You use this information to:

• Guide on-boarding: If you find a that a high-risk area gets abandoned, use this information to on-board a new developer in that part of the code while the previous developer is still around. Maybe they could refactor the hotspot together to mitigate the risk?
• Support planning and priorities: If the simulation shows that the organization will lose active knowledge of entire components or sub-systems, then you might have to re-prioritize or re-plan features that require extensions of those components. Typically, this means scheduling additional time for learning.

Explore More and try CodeScene

An off-boarding is always an risk, and some knowledge will inevitably be lost. With CodeScene as a supporting tool for project management, you detect such issues early and can mitigate the risk based on real data from the evolution of your codebase.

Our FAQ describes the different CodeScene offerings – on-prem, Enterprise, Cloud – and explains how the license works. CodeScene is available as an on-premise version and as a hosted CodeScene Cloud. The on- and off-boarding simulations are exclusive to the on-prem version.