Show HN: GigaDiff – derisk your release with automated bug prediction

Hey dotmanish, in short, there's some research I want to do and people I want to consult before making that public. If you're interested, you can email at yahn007 at gmail dot com and we can chat.

Hey nickelbox,

This is among the several problems that I'm trying to solve. As a developer, when you're calling an existing function -- you don't really have any data at your disposal WRT the quality of that function. Likewise for modifying individual lines. To me, it seems obvious to want this information.

But I'm trying to test that hypothesis and see if other developers feel the same way.

Thanks,

> How much value do you think there would be in some sort of semantic analysis

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of GitSense (https://gitsense.com), which is also focused on predictive defect analysis, among other things.

Incorporating semantic analysis, by cross referencing semantic code changes with bug reports/static analysis report/stack trace reports/etc., will be absolutely critical for defect analysis and automatic code generation, in my opinion. It's also not trivial, both from a computation, storage and retrieval perspective. For example, running semantic diffs analysis on every revision (on any possible branch) and cross referencing the results with external data like bug reports, continous integration results, etc. is a very expensive/complex operation.

In order for ML to work, you need good datasets and in order to generate good datasets, you need lots of raw data (static analysis results, code change history, etc.) that can be data mined and cross-referenced, to produce meaningful data. Creating good datasets for ML, in a scalable manner, will require you to rethink how to extract, store and retrieve code related information.

With GitSense, it's designed to be installed on every developer desktop/workstation, which is how I solve the computation problem. Since every developer workstation is designed to be a continuous indexing machine, indexing can be distributed across dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of machines. Being able to index and cross reference as fast a possible, is absolutely critical, since the goal is to prevent developer mistakes from happening.

Generating semantic analysis is fairly straight forward. Incorporating it, is where the challenge lies.

Agreed on public pricing -- this looks like something that would be quite useful to my team, but I'm not even going to check it out unless I know the ballpark we are looking at.

The read/write access also is a red flag to me, unless there is really solid info on why write access is needed, and how everything is secured.

Hey Nicoulaj,

I'm planning to have this be free for open source. I may even open source it. The ballpark figure I want to target is $1k per month for medium size companies of 20-50 engineers/qa. But I'm still trying to get more data on that.

I'm offering a free trial until March right now. I do all of the integration for you. If you're interested in a demo, you can email me at yahn007 at gmail dot com.

Appreciate the feedback.

Large companies are great at running large data processing apps. They have whole IT teams to do that. Many SAAS products are very different from food delivery, they want to access your kitchen and see all the raw ingredients going into your recipes, the excuse being “we can’t trust you to pay us what our service is worth. Well doesn’t the trust go both ways?

I appreciate your analogy, food delivery is a great thing to make it a service.

But the source code analysis is not an inherent service. This can be done in house with a greater outcome. Win-win-win and one more win for security when running in-house.

My point is that it is bad to offer exclusive SaaS solutions to non-inherently serviceable problems. This is a huge fad and delusion of nowadays.

Actually, it is the smaller and midsized companies who benefit from shared food delivery services. The big ones can run it themselves and not have to pay the middleman. (Though in the end they will join the service again as it is not only a service to deliver food but also to index restaurants and order. So to have people pick your restaurant for delivery you have to join the google of food. But that is not important here.)

Point being, enterprises happily run this locally. Either as/on their cloud on premise or on their servers. Just for our team we have 300 something servers running multiple VMs. I can easily spend a few on a solution like this to do data analysis on our repos. We already have a systems team doing only tooling (build servers, jenkins, test systems, regression dashboards etc.). This would be just another thing for their list.

Having our code leave or accessed outside our premise / DMZ is much, much harder. That would pull in some very heavy discussions with the 3rd party and our legal department.