Better Code Hub
An ambitious yet achievable Definition of Done for Code Quality
Software is eating the world
Remember Marc Andreessen saying that software is eating the world? He meant that each and every industry gets disrupted by software, and that each and every company will become a software company. We think he was right, and at the Software Improvement Group (SIG) we are every day helping our clients with this transformation.
We also witnessed the rise of collaborative developer platforms, the biggest one being GitHub. About 3 years ago, GitHub surpassed 10 million repositories.
This triggered us to create the Better Code Hub, an online service that puts 15 years of code quality knowledge at the disposal of all GitHub developers.
Sharing 15 years of code analysis experience
We’d love to see all developers in the world write maintainable, future-proof code. Given the importance of software today, this is not a luxury, but a necessity.
Since the turn of the century SIG has analyzed thousands of industry software systems on code quality aspects. By offering Better Code Hub, we make our knowledge of code quality accessible to a worldwide developer audience.
So what makes Better Code Hub special?
Guidelines and thresholds based on data
Better Code Hub is an online source code analysis service that checks a code base for compliance to the ten guidelines presented in Building Maintainable Software: Ten Guidelines for Future-Proof Code. The thresholds in the guidelines are derived from our industry benchmark full of software analysis data.
Better Code Hub does not flood you with violations
The biggest difference between Better Code Hub and any other code analysis tool or service we’ve heard of is that Better Code Hub is not violations-based, but uses a different approach.
Better Code Hub analyzes code according to a handful of metrics and then for each metric determines how much of your code is in one of four risk categories. For each metric, we have fixed thresholds for how much of your code may be in the higher risk categories, and if you don’t go over any threshold for a metric, then you are compliant with the corresponding guideline.
Not so in a violations-based model: a violations-based model implicitly assumes that you need to fix each and every violation; and it often allows you to define your own threshold for violation detection.
When you are not compliant, Better Code Hub suggests refactoring candidates and tells you for any selection of those what compliance impact they will have.
Better Code Hub provides teams a Definition of Done
If Better Code Hub compliance is achieved, you know you’re performing like the top teams in the industry. This is because the compliance thresholds are derived from a large industry and open-source benchmark that is calibrated yearly in our software laboratory to capture the state-of-the art in software engineering.
Better Code Hub allows teams to add a clear code quality goal to their Definition of Done. Use Better Code Hub to figure out (for example during retrospectives) which area of the code to focus on for meaningful quality improvements. And use it to maintain the right level of quality at each commit, review, and release.
Zero set-up time and immediate developer feedback
You can just login with your GitHub account and start analyzing your public repositories for free. There is no set-up time, you will get your first results within minutes. We accept code bases up to 100,000 lines of code in 14 modern technologies (including Java, C#, JavaScript, Swift, Python, and many more to come). Better Code Hub integrates with your GitHub flow too, simply toggle a switch to have it run at every Push and Pull Request.
So head over to bettercodehub.com and start improving what matters.
Happy Coding!
