Case Study: CERN reduces technical debt with Sourcegraph

Sourcegraph empowers CERN to tackle code reuse and code changes in mission-critical applications

CERN, the particle physics research organization, needed a way to manage a massive Java codebase for accelerator controls that had grown to about 15 million lines across nearly 300 developers. Their challenge was avoiding duplication, understanding code reuse, and safely handling changes in mission-critical software without disrupting accelerator operations. Sourcegraph’s universal code search was used to help developers quickly search the full codebase and find reusable code.

With Sourcegraph, CERN was able to reduce technical debt, consolidate its codebase, and identify deprecated APIs and reusable utility code for shared libraries. The tool also helped developers assess the impact of API changes, make backward-compatible updates, and confidently manage larger upgrade-period changes. Sourcegraph gave CERN better visibility into code usage, improved collaboration, and saved developers significant time by helping them avoid reinventing work that had already been done.

CERN

Vito Baggiolini

Senior Software Engineer