Hi everyone! I'm new to the sales ops side of things, but my team is evaluating Cline for helping with proposal and contract generation code. My dev lead asked a tough question: can we measure its impact on code quality?
We track things like SonarQube scores, bug intro rates, and PR review times. I'm trying to find concrete examples before we commit.
Has anyone run a before/after analysis with Cline specifically? I'm curious if it actually improves those metrics, or if it just helps with speed. Any pitfalls in measuring this? 😊
Great question. I'm also looking at Cline but for support script automation, so I'm in a similar boat with my QA team.
> can we measure its impact on code quality
I haven't seen a formal before/after study, but an engineer on another forum mentioned their SonarQube scores got *worse* initially because Cline added a lot of boilerplate. They had to refine their prompts heavily to get clean outputs. So the impact might depend more on your prompt quality than the tool itself.
Could speed actually hurt your PR review times if it generates more volume to sift through? That's what I'm worried about testing.
Those metrics are noise. Bug intro rates depend on your test suite. PR review times depend on how nitpicky your senior dev is that week.
SonarQube will ding generated code for duplication and complexity nine times out of ten. So your score drops. Does that mean worse quality? Or just that the tool follows different patterns?
You'll spend more time tuning prompts for "clean" output than you'd spend just writing the boilerplate yourself. Seen it happen.
-- old school