Softagram - Making Code Reviews Humane

Written by softagram | Published 2020/10/29
Tech Story Tags: automated-code-review | code-review-automation | code-reviews | devsecops | software-development | code-review | coding | good-company

TLDRvia the TL;DR App

The story of Softagram is a long one and has many twists. Everything started in a small company long time ago, from the area of static analysis tools development. After many phases, Softagram is focusing on helping developers to get visual feedback on the code change: how is the software design evolving in the pull request under review.

Benefits of code change visualization and dependency checks

While it is trivial to write 20 KLOC apps without help of tooling, usually things start getting complicated when the system grows over 100 KLOC.
The risk of god class anti-pattern, and the risk of mixing up with the responsibilities are increasing exponentially while the software grows larger.
To help with that, software evolution can be tracked safely with explicit dependency change reports provided automatically to each pull request. Blocking bad PR becomes easy, and having visual reports also has a democratizing effect on code review.

Basic building blocks of Softagram

- Architectural analysis of the code, identifying how delta is impacting to the code base. Language specific analyzers are able to extract the essential internal/external dependency structures from each of the mainstream programming languages.
- Checking for rule violations or anomalies in the delta, e.g. finding out cyclical dependencies. Graph theory comes to big help when finding out unwanted or weird dependencies.
- Building visualization for humans. Complex structures such as software is not easy to represent without help of graph visualization. Here comes the vital role of change graph visualization technology developed within the last few years.

Now available as open source

Contact our support AT softagram.com for connecting your public GitHub repository with Softagram opensource.softagram.com.

Written by softagram | Automated Code Review - making code changes easier to understand, and preventing architectural degradation
Published by HackerNoon on 2020/10/29