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 engineering leads a fuller view of their codebase.

Founded in 2013, Sourcegraph is a code intelligence platform that helps developers at companies such as Amazon, Uber, and PayPal search through and explore their organization’s entire codebase. It’s setting out to “tackle the big code problem,” addressing the growing volume and variety of source code that businesses have to deal with across myriad projects. With Sourcegraph, developers can figure out how to use a particular function, find and fix things more quickly, identify what impact a code-change will have on its dependencies, and more.

With Code Insights, Sourcegraph is striving to transform the codebase into real data, allowing its users to create customized visual dashboards on the fly replete with meaningful stats.

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

Riddle me this

So what kind of questions can Code Insights answer? Well, if an engineering manager wants to check on the progress of a migration to a new GraphQL library, for example, they can create graphs and charts that instantly show that it’s 87% complete, with 45 projects still using the old library.

Aside from tracking migrations and refactors, Code Insights could also be used to track whether code is being well-documented with README files to ensure that new hires can be onboarded more easily It could also be used to track specific areas of a codebase that is lagging behind on an upgrade, or garner a more complete picture on the Log4j vulnerability to see how long the vulnerable code has been in a codebase for — and how quickly it has been removed.

At its core, Code Insights is all about helping engineering teams keep control of their vast and ever-growing codebase, while enabling them to communicate milestones, progress, and obstacles visually to colleagues — without having to resort to painful manual processes such as spreadsheets which are difficult to scale over thousands of repositories.

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

“Code Insights works on any code connected to the Sourcegraph instance — today, that means companies that want to use Sourcegraph with open source code just connect those repositories to their instance,” Slack explained. “Then, Code Insights works on that code like it does on any other connected repository — including running insights over both that code, and their proprietary code, in the same data series.”

Code Insights is the latest in a line of new products Sourcegraph has launched over the past year. Back 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 across repositories.

And so Code Insights is just the latest piece of the Sourcegraph puzzle, as it moves further beyond code search.