Improve Code Quality
Continuous Reliability. Stop bad code getting promoted.
The team at AP can help not only with application performance issues but also application code quality issues that can result in bugs, logged errors or exceptions being thrown. All applications will suffer bugs and the more complex an application is, the more likely it is that they will occur. We help customers gain visibility into their application errors and their frequency and impact. We can then automate the verification process as part of a Continuous Integration pipeline, so that bad code stops being promoted, code quality improves and errors are reduced. In the case where bugs are spotted we can provide right-first-time routing so that the right developer or team is notified.
We help customers gain visibility into their application errors, their frequency and impact. Issues are then routed to the right team first time along with the root cause analysis.
For most developers, code quality is a matter of pride. Nobody wants to be associated with bad code but in any complex software application it can't always be avoided due to the number of moving parts. In this case the priority is spotting the bad code early, ideally as part of an automated process, that can flag up code quality issues early before the code reaches production.
Avoid Bugs
Bugs are inevitable within any software application. Avoiding 100% of bugs is not always possible but being able to identify the ones which affect the most people or have the biggest cost associated with them is the first part to getting a grip on bugs. The next step then is to be able to remediate these bugs rapidly which requires source code, variable state, log messages and environment variable in order to get to the root cause quickly.
Look at any application log file and you will see errors. Some applications can produce millions of lines of log messages per day and finding which ones are real problems and which ones can be ignored is difficult. Even with log analytics solutions that aggregate logs from multiple servers, finding problems is often like looking for a needle in a haystack. And to make things worse you don't even know that the needle is even in the haystack since not all errors make their way to logs files; some are swallowed or not logged. AP can help focus on the right errors and provide ways to fix them quickly without trawling through logs.
For agile development teams looking to ship code to production quickly, the challenge is to avoid bad code getting promoted without being caught. In the ideal world bad code should be caught in the earliest possible environment so that it can be fixed before it progresses on its way to production. Bugs that reach production are often the most difficult to fix and more costly to the business. AP can help spot bad code early and provide the fix before it becomes a problem.
For customers that are running CI pipelines to automatically build and test their code, we can add an additional verification step to the pipeline to check that no new errors or exceptions were added as result of that build. If new errors have crept in then we can mark the build as unstable and stop that code progressing on its journey to production until it is fixed.
When new errors or exception are found then we can setup rules so that they are routed to the right developer or team without bouncing around different teams, avoiding delays in getting things fixed. The rules can be based on things such as application name, package name or class name and allow new issues to be intelligently routed to the right place. This can be through your preferred mechanism such as Slack, Jira, Email, HipChat and more.