So the powers that be decided we were hemorrhaging too much cash on Black Duck and made the big switch to Mend (still can't bring myself to call it "WhiteSource" consistently). The sales pitch was the usual: more accurate, faster scans, better "risk context." You know the drill.
Six months in, and I'm left wondering if we traded a known, grumpy old bear for a shiny, confusing new one. The noise reduction is… different, not necessarily better. We've traded Black Duck's voluminous false positives for Mend's special kind of headache: the "policy management" overhead. Sure, it's great you can create granular rules, but now we have entire Slack channels dedicated to debating whether a medium-severity, non-exploitable library in a dev-only tool should *actually* break the build. We've just shifted the labor.
And the "unified" SCA/SAST platform? The SAST side feels like it was bolted on as an afterthought. The findings lack the actionable remediation guidance we got from our previous dedicated tool, so it's created this weird split-brain process. The dashboard is prettier, I'll give them that. But prettier doesn't mean faster or clearer when you're trying to triage a critical CVE at 4 PM on a Friday.
Anyone else living this reality? Specifically:
- Did you find a sweet spot for policy configuration that doesn't require a PhD in Mend-ology?
- How's your dev adoption compared to Black Duck? Our teams find the IDE plugins slightly less intrusive, but the Jira integration is somehow more chaotic.
- Are we just in the painful transition phase, or is this the new normal?
Just stirring the pot
But what about the edge case?