SoundcheckBeta
Ensure quality, reliability and alignment of software development with codified checks and guidance.
About Soundcheck
The Soundcheck plugin visualizes checks for security, testing, reliability, and other development and operational standards for your software components. Instead of asking your developers to file and respond to yet another ticket, streamline software quality through Soundcheck’s clear scorecards, actionable feedback, and positive reinforcement.
Ensure high-quality code
With Soundcheck, engineering organizations can define development and operational standards, equipping developers with strong guidance and visualization to illustrate how the tech health of their components aligns with their organization’s best practices. Take the guesswork out of developing code that aligns to best practices.
Understand the big picture
You shouldn’t have to work so hard to understand your team’s overall tech health. Soundcheck visualizes components’ alignment to organizational best practices, so that teams can understand their software ecosystem’s tech health at a glance.
Cultivate alignment to best practices
When owners can easily see the tech health of their components, it incentivizes quality, reliability, and alignment throughout your software ecosystem. Soundcheck encourages and streamlines high-quality and compliant code development.
Soundcheck features
Entity page
The entity page provides a comprehensive snapshot of a specific entity’s tech health. Identify how compliant an entity is to the best practices set by your team and pinpoint specific areas for improvement.
Programs
A program is a long-term health initiative. It defines the development and operational standards used to measure the health of a software component. Users can design programs to create tech health targets in line with your organization’s needs.
Checks
A check is the best practice an entity is graded against. Check results are the outcome of running a check against an entity – either pass or fail. If the check fails, you receive feedback on what caused the failure and guidance on how to pass the check, streamlining the feedback loop.
Certification
Certification is the status of passing all checks within a level. You can view your component’s certification on the component page. Completing a certification unlocks a fun surprise! 🎉
Overview page
The overview page provides a grid view of all entities owned by specific groups inside your organization and their current tech health. Identify quickly which entities are compliant to your team's best practices and which ones need improvement.
Frequently Asked Questions 🤔
Where can I find installation instructions and technical documentation for Soundcheck?
All of the installation instructions for the Spotify Plugins for Backstage are public via npm packages. You can find the documentation specifically for Soundcheck in this npm package. What is a Soundcheck program and how is it created/modified?
A Soundcheck program is a logical grouping of a collection of checks. Soundcheck programs define their check collections in a .yaml file (config.yaml). This configuration is currently static, but future releases will include a UI allowing users to perform CRUD operations on programs.What are Soundcheck checks and how are they created/modified?
A check is a comparison between a defined acceptable outcome and the actual outcome of a given process. Checks are defined by users, and can be any arbitrary code that performs a logical check of some kind, and then posts the result of that check to Soundcheck. Results of checks are submitted to Soundcheck, recorded, and made visible to users.How do I integrate a check’s status into my CI/CD?
Soundcheck currently allows CI/CD integration through custom check implementations. Should a check fail, the check can signal the CI/CD system to halt a build. Future releases will look to provide more seamless support for CI/CD integration, allowing a build to proceed, fail, or be ignored based on checks’ pass/fail states more natively, without this responsibility falling to the checks themselves.Where are Soundcheck’s checks’ results stored?
Check Results are stored in the central Backstage database, or a plugin-specific database if configured.Does Soundcheck keep a history of check results?
By default, Soundcheck retains only the latest result for each check to limit the size of the check results database. Users can enable tracking of check result history in order to track the change in check results over time.After I’ve enabled check result history, how can I view it?
At this time, Soundcheck does not have support for viewing check result history. However, external systems such as Tableau can be used to visualize this data.How do we submit the results of a check to Soundcheck?
Soundcheck provides a simple REST API which can accept the results of a batch of check invocations. Soundcheck then aggregates and displays these results.Does Soundcheck provide any integrations with third-party tools?
Yes! Out-of-the-box, Soundcheck integrates with GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, Gerrit, BitBucketCloud, and BitBucketServer. Facts that can be collected from source control management providers include file existence and file content extraction via regular expressions or JSON/yaml paths. For GitHub, facts can also be extracted from repository details and branch protection information. For more information on these integrations, see the SCM Readme and GitHub Readme.Does Spotify provide any of its programs for Soundcheck?
Our goal is to be as non-opinionated as possible about the programs you define and what constitutes passing a check.