During the last year I’ve spent quite a number of evenings and weekends creating deCrex – Development Environment Cross Examiner. It’s a time to present it for your judgment. Take a look, shoot your questions, request features to implement next, suggest repositories and build servers for this demo installation.
deCrex is an intranet application, which examines content and configurations of systems in software development environment and then reports on their consistency, completeness and adherence to the company rules. By doing this deCrex aims for optimal use of the environment and helps teams to find the code, to build, to test and to deliver software with maximum confidence.
Today software development teams use a number of various applications or systems. These systems are for source code management, backlog management, automated execution of builds and tests, reporting on code analyses, etc, etc. Each of these systems has its own purpose and provides a great help. However lack of their integration can result in costly mistakes.
- Nothing will warn you if there is no automated build for a shared library or there are builds, which endlessly wait for a change in obsolete code;
- You might be pleased with reported code quality matrices, while a few projects are missing in these reports;
- A development team, being cautious about backward compatibility, might decide to duplicate code instead of changing the existing one, while the only other user of this code is a project in the neighbouring room.
deCrex extracts meta-data of the content and configurations of development environment systems. It analyses their consistency, completeness, adherence to configurable rules and reports the gaps. It becomes a searchable knowledge base with retrieved descriptions of software modules, projects and build configurations. By doing this deCrex increases efficiency of development environment, eases re-use and facilitates knowledge sharing within the company.