Launch HN: Infield (YC W20) – Safer, faster dependency upgrades
I clicked into this because I was excited, but everything feels like it&#x27;s missing the mark for me. And, that pricing. Woof. That&#x27;s steep for being a fancy changelog interpreter.<p>----<p>My biggest pain isn&#x27;t with the plan. It&#x27;s with the actual upgrade process. Things _always_ break. Every single time we do a major upgrade, there&#x27;s this long tail of things we need to fix. Even worse is the undocumented changes that break. This gives me nightmares.<p>The problem with your product is four parts:<p>* It needs to solve much more of the problem. It&#x27;s not really valuable to know that I need to change stuff. I can figure that out by running my package managers update tool and seeing what breaks.<p>* When things break, it&#x27;s unbelievably time consuming to fix them. Even worse is the person tasked with doing the upgrade is likely not the subject matter expert on broken code.<p>* I need to know what&#x27;s broken that wasn&#x27;t documented. This is by far the hardest part of our upgrade cycles. It keeps me up at night knowing a major upgrade could break things that aren&#x27;t covered by unit tests.<p>* Because dependency upgrades are so hard, we tend to do them in large swoops. We set aside a week or two of pain and power through them. Given you&#x27;re charging $60&#x2F;m, this suggests:<p><pre><code>  * Your model is more aligned with small, continuous upgrades. Once you&#x27;re &quot;close&quot; to the most recent version, it tends to be easier to upgrade.

  * Your model needs a better way to &quot;gain pace&quot; with the latest releases. If I can incrementally upgrade one package on every PR until I&#x27;m up to date, that&#x27;d be amazing.
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-----<p>I think this tool would be extremely value to me (likely $60&#x2F;m&#x2F;repo) if it:<p>* It ran the repo&#x27;s test suite against progressively newer versions of dependencies. Showing when and where unit tests fail.<p>* Provide some means of &quot;intelligent E2E&quot; testing. Fire up our API&#x2F;application. Tell us what changes when dependencies are upgraded.<p>* Fan out broken code to the subject matter expert. If an upgrade from X to Y is broken, look at the `git blame` to figure out who knows how to fix the code. Ping them asking them for help.