Tackling legacy code issues for developers across the globe with automatic refactoring from Sourcery.

Brendan Maginnis is CEO and co-founder of Sourcery, a real-time refactoring tool for developers. In 2021, they closed a $1.75m seed funding round, led by Forward, investing alongside Runa Capital, Techstars, Angel Invest, CapitalX, Acequia Capital, and other private angel investors.

Why did you and the team develop Sourcery?

My co-founder Nick and I worked together for several years at a retail financial software company with a dated codebase that was mostly from the late 80s. It had most of the issues you'd expect in a legacy codebase. It was complex, slow to develop on, and any new development risked introducing unseen bugs. As we dealt with these challenges, we became very good at refactoring code and navigating complex, legacy codebases, but we also felt that there needed to be a better way to deal with these issues than manually refactoring.

As we chatted with more software developers, we realised that this wasn't just a problem at companies with 20+ years of legacy code. It was a problem that slowed down software engineering teams everywhere. Complex code and design decisions made in the past significantly slow down future development. We started building Sourcery to automatically review and fix or refactor code so that teams could start to automatically fix those issues in legacy codebases and prevent these code quality issues from ever arising.

Why is Sourcery different?

We've built Sourcery so that it can do more than simply flag issues that exist in your code — it can actually fix them for you. While it can be helpful to get a notification or a warning that there's a potential issue in your code, it's useless unless you know how to fix it. With Sourcery, you can instantly apply our suggestions to make your code better, rather than just having one more warning about potential problems.

Our tools integrate directly into a developer’s code editor, code hosting platforms, and the company’s CI/CD pipeline, improving code across every step of the software development process. Today, Sourcery is used by 7,000 developers every month, and at organisations across the globe like Sky, Microsoft, Amazon, and LinkedIn.

We’re helping developers move beyond the current industry standards for code review and improvement. Most teams currently rely on manual code review or tools that point out potential issues with the code, but Sourcery takes things further by continually reviewing the code and showing developers exactly how it can be improved — it cuts down on technical debt, reducing time spent on manual code review and increasing the speed of future development.

What’s next for Sourcery?

Every codebase is unique and has its own nuances. That's why we're expanding Sourcery to allow teams to create their own custom sets of rules and code guidelines that Sourcery will then automatically apply and enforce for them. This helps teams to standardise their codebase, ensure compliance regulations are met, and cut down on the manual time that developers need to spend on code reviews. At the same time, we're continuing to make the core Sourcery engine more powerful so that every Sourcery user, whether you're a hobbyist or an enterprise team, sees more impactful improvements on their code every day.

We've been so lucky to be able to find a great partner inForward who are focused on helping us get Sourcery where it needs to go - from the first day we started working with Luke & the studio team the focus has always been on 'what does success look like for you' and helping us achieve our vision.

Have you got your sales engine roaring? We'd love to hear from you! You can apply for funding here or apply for Office Hours here.