Are you a Development agency owner? Development team lead? or freelance Developer? If you are, then there is a very good chance one of the aspects of your role that takes up time and effort is reviewing code. Whether you’re reviewing code written by your team or reviewing code of a potential new client, the process of performing these reviews is often time consuming, repetitive and difficult.
In the scenario of a potential new client coming to you asking you to pitch for their business, you will almost certainly be asked how much its going to cost to fix their issues or asked to review the quality of what they have. For every developer this is a double edged sword, because on one hand you want to make sure you have a decent understanding of the code, languages used and complexity before you agree to work with the client or put any estimates together. But on the flip side, you don’t want to spend hours or days reviewing code free of charge if there are no guarantees you are going to want to work with the client or that the client will choose you for their project.
So what do you do? You could charge the client for the initial code review, however you will be competing with agencies that are offering a free code review, so you are already at a disadvantage.
What you really want is a system of performing a code review quickly, efficiently to answer all of the questions you would have prior to onboarding a new client project.
Introducing The Code Registry, the worlds first code intelligence and analysis platform powered by AI
The Code Registry’s core platform is designed around code intelligence and analysis. By signing up to any of our package tiers you can quickly and easily sync any code repository to your dashboard and run a full analysis within minutes. The output of this analysis covers everything you would expect to review when performing a full code audit manually yourself. Not only that, once the analysis has ran you can then dive deeper into any of the dashboard facets if you want to ascertain more information about particular areas of the code. For instance you might be interested to understand more about any security issues relating to external API calls, or assess how many Open Source Components are being relied on within the code. Whatever you’re trying to understand, our AI assistant Ada is there to help.
Lastly, as anyone who has prepared a code review audit will know, the final time consuming part is documenting your findings into a report you can send. Well we’ve got that taken care of too. As soon as we’ve sync’d your codebase you can download the entire report of analysis into a beautifully prepared PDF report, ready to slot into your own report decks and email to your client. If you choose our business tier you can also customise these reports to include your own company branding.
What elements of a code review audit are covered by The Code Registry?
Our founders, Mark Purdy and Stephen Gray, spent over 10 years running successful Digital Agencies and performed hundreds of code reviews. It is from this experience that The Code Registry was designed. Every feature and piece of analysis is designed to help support your understanding of your (or your clients) code. Below we’ve highlighted some of the key areas of the platform that will immediately showcase the value of the dashboard and PDF report output.
1) Languages Used
A key aspect of any code review is firstly understanding what coding languages are present within the code repository. Your client might provide you with this direction, but what else is there? We’ve all been there when the client says its PHP and then it turns out there is a whole different framework being used within the repo. This is critical for any developer to know in order to ascertain if they will be able to work with the code or not.
2) Code Contributors
When reviewing code its always useful to see how many people have been working on the project. While not always the case, often the more contributors to a code repository the more likely it is there will be varying styles present. This is also an incredibly useful piece of analysis to provide a prospective client as they have never been provided the detail from their incumbent on who is doing the work on their codebase, so being able to show them is a powerful element of transparency.
2) Code Contributors
When reviewing code its always useful to see how many people have been working on the project. While not always the case, often the more contributors to a code repository the more likely it is there will be varying styles present. This is also an incredibly useful piece of analysis to provide a prospective client as they have probably never been provided the detail from their incumbent on who is doing the work on their codebase, so being able to show them is a powerful element of transparency.
3) Open Source Components
The Code Registry’s system scans the code for any references to third party dependencies and packages. While common practice, it is essential as developers to know how many are present and whether they are up to date or not as they can pose challenges if not carefully managed. Keeping them updated is crucial for security and performance. Using many different components can lead to maintenance complexities and potential security vulnerabilities, so showcasing this and explaining the importance is critical to any code review.
4) Code Complexity
We use a number of metrics to calculate how “complex” the code is. The main one is “Cyclomatic Complexity” or “CC”, which is a software metric used to indicate the complexity of a program. It is a quantitative measure of the number of linearly independent paths through a program’s source code. A low score indicates simple code with few decision points, while a high score indicates complex code with many decision points. While not full proof, by having a complexity score it allows you to communicate and plan this with your potential clients.
4) Code Complexity
We use a number of metrics to calculate how complex the code is. The main one is “Cyclomatic Complexity” or “CC”, which is a software metric used to indicate the complexity of a program. It is a quantitative measure of the number of linearly independent paths through a program’s source code. A low score indicates simple code with few decision points, while a high score indicates complex code with many decision points. While not full proof, by having a complexity score it allows you to communicate and plan this with your potential clients.
5) Security Vulnerabilities
The Code Registry system scans the codebase and any detected third party dependencies to find any potential security vulnerabilities. This is of course essential to know and present back to your clients as it will dictate what work you are going to need to undertake to stabalise your clients code before you begin any enhancements. Our system will rank any detected vulnerabilities by severity so you can quickly assess what will need to be worked on and resolved urgently vs lower priority.
Sign up and try it
Whether you are a CTO, Team Lead, or Freelance Developer, we guarantee that The Code Registry’s suite of tools and AI assistant will empower you to make better decisions, save time and deliver a better service to your clients. It is not only a tool to simply run code reviews, through a single account you can sync all of your client projects to monitor and analyse them ongoing. Just think, one place to be alerted of any new security vulnerabilities across all your projects? One place to review your teams output?
Set your own schedules within each project in-line with your development processes and compare versions to track changes and then present back to your clients. Showcasing your value and transparency, building trust and better working relationships.
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