CircleCI acquires test intelligence platform Ponicode

Today we are pleased to announce that CircleCI has acquired Ponicode, a Paris-based AI engine for analyzing source code, with the goal to help developers produce better code in their local development environment.

Ponicode caught our attention with their dedicated focus to helping developers handle their least favorite tasks — the toil surrounding writing code — such as authoring tests, commenting code, analyzing code quality, and more. Ponicode’s ethos around improving the lives of developers and getting to production faster aligns perfectly with our mission, and will help CircleCI manage change so software teams can innovate faster.

Using AI to test more effectively

We talk a lot about the importance of code coverage for quality production code, but what we’ve heard loud and clear from our customers is that code coverage alone, whether that’s 60%, 80%, or 99% coverage, is only part of the picture for making good decisions. Beyond what’s available to address, teams need to know where to focus their test priorities — which part of the codebase is most critical? Our acquisition of Ponicode will allow you to apply the power of AI to identify the highest priority gaps to fill, and in many cases, write your tests for you.

Continuously improving CI/CD

Our goal is to provide the best CI/CD tooling available. The addition of Ponicode’s test writing and scoring capabilities further enhances this goal. This acquisition increases our ability to serve developers, relieve them of their least-loved tasks, and continue to support them in delivering high quality software, quickly, and at scale.

While CircleCI has up until now provided the best solution for teams to build, test, deploy, and release their software, we saw there was much opportunity to help developers deal with the daily challenges faced in their individual work.

Bringing in the Ponicode team not only enables us to bring new capabilities to our customers, but also will help us deliver existing platform capabilities directly to developers where they are most productive, within their local development environment, or IDE.

CircleCI will now be able to extend our tooling with unit testing support and code coverage prioritization to developers, enabling them to write better software in the tools and environments they already use every day, while also being the central CI/CD platform where you bring your work together with the work of the rest of your team, and the rest of your organization.

What you can expect

If you’re using Ponicode today, rest assured that the service will remain available to you as we work to integrate it into CircleCI.

This acquisition also extends our global footprint to France, as we welcome the Paris-based Ponicode team as full employees of CircleCI. Accelerating innovation cycles and decreasing toil for developers is an incredibly exciting mission for us. If you agree, join us. We’re hiring.

If you’re new to CircleCI, sign up now to see how continuous integration can help you ship better software today.