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A tool for providing insights to all the software projects & people within a large organization?

As a freelance consultant, I have noticed the larger companies are surprisingly opaque in their organization. It can be quite difficult to figure out answers to basic questions like "who is working on this", "how many projects are using this technology already (version xyz)", and "where is most developer effort going to".

Most organizations will have a Git organization tool like GitHub or GitLab, and probably some type of organogram or list of projects, but those are limited in what they can do.

So what I've done several times in the past already, is create a tool for scraping the GitLab/GitHub API, reading the repositories (which can be hundreds if not thousands), figuring out dependencies for each project, and to know the top contributors for each. For this current company I'm also adding more data for each contributor about their role, their team, and their knowledge. All this data can be queried easily in a graph database.

So it's like an asset management / git repository analysis / inventory / organogram graph-based tool. I don't know what to call it yet.

Does this sound like a problem you recognize? Or not at all? Any existing tools you think of? Could this be worth productizing & selling to other companies?

Thanks for any input!

on October 20, 2022
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    Hi Laurens, this idea crossed my mind a couple of times in the last year too and I created some crude scripts to the same effect.

    In the market at large there are a couple of tools that can achieve parts of this already, like Sourcegraph,
    Dependabot and others.

    Most of them are either extremely expensive or targeted at people like us that like to tinker with their infrastructure.
    So I think there may very well be room for a simpler "turn-key" solution to solve this problem,
    either sold to organizations or even to people like us that need to get up and running in many organizations in a short time.

    If you want I'd be happy to chat about this idea and possible opportunities.