With Code Insights, Sourcegraph gives developers a better understanding of their codebase

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Universal code search platform Sourcegraph today announced Code Insights, an analytics tool designed to give developers and technical leads a more complete picture of their codebase.

Founded in 2013, Sourcegraph is a code intelligence platform that helps developers at companies such as Amazon, Uber, and PayPal search and explore the entire codebase of their organization. It aims to “tackle the big code problem”, by addressing the growing volume and variety of source code that companies are dealing with in countless projects. With Sourcegraph, developers can figure out how to use a particular feature, find and fix things faster, determine the impact a code change will have on its dependencies, and more.

With Code Insights, Sourcegraph aims to turn the codebase into real data, so users can instantly create custom visual dashboards, packed with meaningful metrics.

“Code Insights turns a company’s codebase into actionable data to help leaders understand how project, engineering and business goals are progressing,” Quinn Slack, CEO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, told VentureBeat.

Source Chart: Code Insights

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So what kind of questions can Code Insights answer? Well, if an engineering manager wants to monitor the progress of a migration to a new GraphQL library, they can create graphs and charts that immediately show that they are 87% complete, with 45 projects still using the old library.

Aside from tracking migrations and refactoring, Code Insights can also be used to track whether code is properly documented with README files to make hiring new hires easier. It can also be used to track specific parts of a lagging codebase lagging behind an upgrade, or get a more complete picture of the Log4j vulnerability to see how long the vulnerable code has been in a codebase – and how quickly it was removed .

Sourcegraph: Code Insights in action

At its core, Code Insights is about helping technical teams stay in control of their massive and ever-expanding code base, while also visually communicating milestones, progress and obstacles to colleagues – without resorting to painful manual processes like spreadsheets those are difficult to scale across thousands of repositories.

It’s also worth noting that Code Insights is compatible with a company’s entire codebase, from open source projects on GitHub to proprietary code in private repositories.

“Code Insights works on any code associated with the Sourcegraph instance – these days, that means companies that want to use Sourcegraph with open source code simply link these repositories to their instance,” explains Slack. “Then Code Insights works on that code as it does on any other connected repository — including running insights on both that code and their own code, in the same dataset.”

Code Insights is the latest in a series of new products that Sourcegraph has launched over the past year. In August, the San Francisco-based company brought its existing code search platform to the cloud, as part of a broader ambition to index the entire open source web. And earlier in the year, Sourcegraph launched ‘batch changes’, enabling its enterprise customers to automate large-scale code changes in repositories.

And so Code Insights is just the latest piece of the Sourcegraph puzzle, because it goes beyond just searching for code.

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This post With Code Insights, Sourcegraph gives developers a better understanding of their codebase

was original published at “https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/10/with-code-insights-sourcegraph-gives-developers-a-better-understanding-of-their-codebase/”