Klocwork is rolling out a new brand around code review that the company says is a natural extension of its code-analysis DNA. Called, fittingly, Cahoots, the software engages developers in a social way to review code as it’s being developed.
“No one we knew used code review,” said Klocwork CTO Gwyn Fisher. “There’s a lot of shelfware out there and missed opportunities around code review.”
One of the reasons Fisher cited is that code-review tools have been targeted at the enterprise, and as such have been server-based. But Fisher insists that if you don’t put these types of tools directly in front of developers, and give them control over what they want to review, they won’t be used.
“Source-code analysis is for developers, not the organization at large. But because managers often are measured based on code-analysis metrics, we’ve bent it and twisted it” to be for the organization at large, he said.
Cahoots uses social principles to engage developers, who can either subscribe to a certain project, or set up RSS feeds and jump in on those they find most interesting, Fisher explained. “It’s pretty basic functionality. What you find about code reviews, have you reached the metrics of review… You just want one report: ‘Am I good to ship?’ ”
Code analyzers inside Cahoots present one of those red squiggly underlines in your editor when you make a coding error, and diff sets can be set up to do character implemental updates to provide full data-flow analysis, Fisher said, in what perceptually is a real-time response.
Cahoots is the first in what the company hopes will be numerous products in the developer-facing space, though Fisher wouldn’t provide any details about what else Klocwork is working on. He did hint at the space, though, when he mentioned that Klocwork is pivoting from a QA/reliability play to security.
“When people ship [software], they want to know it’s secure. The only thing people are spending money on these days is security. The [U.S.] government is a wonderful sector for us. They’re scared witless of other countries in the world” hacking into all manner of systems—financial, defense, environmental among them—and wreaking havoc here.
