Hmmm so how do you scale this business of reviewing code?
At the beginning, maybe you sign up some super high-end 10X developers to do reviews. Also run some tools like SpotBugs or Coverity or something.
Then when the ammount of reviews goes up by 10X, what are you going to do? You can't possibly find many 10X developers that are willing to review random crap code.
So you end up reselling cloud-based Coverity licenses (SpotBugs is free).
Also, this only works if the company is willing to share its code with a random startup. Which is kind of a no-go for large shops. So who do you sell to? Large shops won't allow access to their code. Startups would, but they either won't pay in principle (hey we can use SpotBugs or Coverity) or won't pay much.
Can you make a business of it? I don't know, but there are some investments being made, so I guess there is a better story than the one I see.
Disclosure: I'm Lyal Avery, founder of PullRequest.
On functional terms, we have a couple of thousand reviewers that have signed up to review. Our tooling helps them work faster; long term, we'll also provide this tooling to internal terms.
So far, we have about a dozen of the Fortune 500 signed up; larger teams, for a variety of reasons, are more open in some cases (one of the many learnings of this startup).
"we have about a dozen of the Fortune 500 signing up"
Let's be honest. What this means is that someone in the Fortune 500 clicked on your email advertisement. Maybe installed your software.
Do you have anyone in Fortune 500 running critical business on your platform?
> we have a couple of thousand reviewers that have signed up to review.
Anyone can sign up a couple thousand "Mechanical Turk" reviewers in no time. Or "RentACoder" or whatever. What is the value provided? Where I work, the value of "review" provided by someone not deeply involved in the code is "0". Which is why you ask some relevant people to review the code.
Yes; we most definitely have teams from Fortune 500s running mission critical code through out platform. We will be releasing a case study from one in the next quarter.
I would say the difference on the reviewer side of our platform is in quality. We are working to surface this more.
At the beginning, maybe you sign up some super high-end 10X developers to do reviews. Also run some tools like SpotBugs or Coverity or something.
Then when the ammount of reviews goes up by 10X, what are you going to do? You can't possibly find many 10X developers that are willing to review random crap code.
So you end up reselling cloud-based Coverity licenses (SpotBugs is free).
Also, this only works if the company is willing to share its code with a random startup. Which is kind of a no-go for large shops. So who do you sell to? Large shops won't allow access to their code. Startups would, but they either won't pay in principle (hey we can use SpotBugs or Coverity) or won't pay much.
Can you make a business of it? I don't know, but there are some investments being made, so I guess there is a better story than the one I see.