Software markets are like stoplights. They’re always changing, and it’s a good idea to react to those changes.
At G2, we’re thrilled to announce our new Software Intelligence Platforms category in response to this emerging market.
What is a software intelligence platform?
Software intelligence platforms equip organizations and developers with deep insights into their software architecture, code quality, and technical debt. These tools offer a granular analysis of complex codebases by leveraging advanced analytics and visual dependency maps.
The platforms empower development teams to make data-driven decisions regarding code maintenance, refactoring, and strategic planning.
With enhanced codebase observability, teams can optimize their development processes and improve overall software quality and performance.
Software intelligence platforms provide observability for codebases
Spaghetti code. Technical debt. Complex code structures. Modern developers and software architects know that these terms have one thing in common: they’re often the cause of tremendous headaches.
Managing increasingly complicated software architecture and ensuring code quality across a large, evolving codebase requires extensive effort and coordination. It leads to delays and increased costs. Application stakeholders need an intuitive, natural way to monitor code quality and make inquiries into their codebases.
A handful of vendors have been addressing the need for holistic application understanding with an emerging category of products: software intelligence platforms. These tools provide users with interactive visual dependency maps to easily navigate and understand codebases.
In some cases, users can also prompt an AI companion with natural language queries to investigate specifics about their software structures. This achieves observability for codebases, allowing even non-technical users to get the insights they need without having to chase down the right developer.
Other software categories like Software Composition Analysis and Static Code Analysis help users understand and diagnose issues at the code level. However, those tools occupy relatively narrow lanes in comparison to software intelligence platforms.
Software composition analysis tools, for example, monitor and analyze an application’s open-source components and dependencies for security vulnerabilities. Within that scope, they excel at what they do. In contrast, software intelligence platforms grant big-picture codebase monitoring and allow users to zoom in based on various queries, providing a broader perspective on the codebase as a whole.
Benefits and drawbacks: the buyer’s perspective
Buyers who have experienced software intelligence platforms themselves have much to say in G2 reviews about products in the category.
Easy to use, but with a steep learning curve
Software intelligence platform buyers find these solutions easy to use but with a catch. While ease of use is a common theme among buyer likes, some users find onboarding difficult.
"Insights, good and clear information, Ease of use, Very simple to implement..."
CAST Imaging Review, Rajvardhan S.
"Complex graphs to show relationship(s) can take more time for understanding for new subscribers."
CAST Imaging Review, Joe K.
Deep insights, potentially limited feature set
Early adopters of this tech benefit from rich analysis, though some find overall feature sets limited.
"Provides Application Architecture Blueprints. Shows any Architectural drifts. Quick Impact Analysis across technologies, frameworks, layers. Capability to find out quick root cause analysis on tickets. Ability to provide application-wide dependencies. Useful for Transition projects."
CAST Imaging Review, Joe K.
“(M)ore flexibility regarding custom metrics might be great.”
CAST Imaging Review, Verified User.
Intuitive, interactive visualizations can be hampered by slow performance
While buyers love the interactive visual dependency graphs on offer, slow performance can really kill the observability dream.
“The beautiful graphical dashboards enable us to understand the dependencies clearly and resolve the related issues.”
CodeLogic, Inc. Review, Verified User.
"When you have too many nodes in the same view, it is a little bit slow."
CAST Imaging Review, Christopher M.
Watch this space
While software intelligence platforms are nascent, many of these solutions are already robustly useful. Whether buyers prefer analyzing their software architecture by navigating visual node graphs, prompting AI assistants with natural language queries, or a mix of both remains to be seen. In all likelihood, support for both interfacing modes will only improve.
Becoming an early adopter of this technology certainly seems like a good idea, as many buyers are already praising its benefits.
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Edited by Monishka Agrawal
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