Getting Started with StretchDev

What StretchDev is

StretchDev is your workspace's code-quality platform. You connect the repositories your team owns as projects, run scans against their source, and StretchDev grades the code on three objective A–E ratings — Maintainability, Reliability, and Security — while listing every bug, code smell, and security vulnerability it finds down to the file and line.

Think of it as the quality and release-risk layer for your engineering work. It never runs your code; the engine reads your source as text and measures it, then holds each scan to a quality gate so you know whether a change is safe to ship.

Key concepts

Five ideas power everything in StretchDev:

• Project — a repository you've connected. Holds its name, repository URL, default branch, primary language, and an optional custom quality-gate policy. Every project gets a stable key like proj-4f2a9c8b1d0e.
• Scan — one analysis run against a project's source. Produces ratings, a duplication percentage, an issue list, and a pass/fail gate result. Scans are keyed like scan-7b3c… and stored so you can review history.
• Issue — a single finding inside a scan: a bug, a code smell, or a vulnerability, tagged with a severity of blocker, critical, major, minor, or info, plus the file, line, rule, and a message.
• Quality gate — the policy a scan must pass. Each condition compares a measured metric against a threshold and reports Pass or Fail.
• API platform — the developer console for automation: scoped API keys, webhooks, delivery logs, request logs, and usage metrics.

The app is organized into tabs along the left rail: Dashboard, Projects, Scans, and Quality, plus the API console where you manage keys, webhooks, and logs.

Your first steps

1. Open StretchDev from your StretchSuite apps. You'll land on the Dashboard, which shows headline counts — Projects, Scans, Failed gates, and Open vulnerabilities — plus your repository mix by language and the analysis engine's status.
2. Connect your first repository. Go to the Projects tab and click New. Enter a project name, the repository URL, the default branch (defaults to main), and the primary language. The project appears in the table immediately and is scoped to your organization automatically.
3. Run your first scan. On the project's row, click Run, then provide a source file path (for example src/index.js), the source text to analyze, a branch, and an optional commit SHA. StretchDev analyzes the file, evaluates your gate, and records the scan.
4. Read the results. Click Scans on the project row (or open the Scans tab) to see the run. Click any scan to expand its ratings and its full issue table.
5. Check quality and risk. Open the Quality tab to see A–E ratings, the rating mix, your quality-gate conditions, and the Release risk calculator for scoring a proposed changeset.

Tip: The Dashboard's Open vulnerabilities card is your fastest health check. If it's above zero, jump to Scans, open the most recent scan, and filter the issue table for vulnerability-type findings.

A quick worked example

Say your team owns a Node.js service. You add it as a project called Billing API with repo URL https://git.example.com/billing-api, branch main, language JavaScript. You run a scan on src/charge.js. StretchDev returns a Maintainability rating of B, a Security rating of C, 3% duplication, and four issues — one major bug, two minor code smells, and one critical vulnerability. Your gate requires a Security rating of A, so the scan is marked Failed gate and the vulnerability shows on your dashboard's Open vulnerabilities card. You now know exactly what to fix before shipping.

Tips

• Add your busiest repositories first — the ones that change most benefit most from continuous scoring.
• Set the correct primary language on each project so ratings and file snippets render in the right syntax.
• Bookmark the Dashboard as your daily standup view; the four headline cards summarize the whole workspace.
• Read features work immediately. Only compute actions (new scan, gate preview, release-risk, AI review) depend on the optional engine.

What you need before you start

Most read features — viewing projects, scans, ratings, and stored issues — work out of the box. Running a new scan, previewing a quality gate, scoring release risk, and AI review require the StretchDev analysis engine (and, for AI, the AI reviewer) to be enabled by your administrator. If those actions return an "engine is not enabled" message, that's the fix — see the FAQ & Troubleshooting article for details.