On any given page load, do you know exactly which database queries run in the backend? How your batch jobs are triggered and retries are handled? Can you trace how data flows through your systems and when users hit each path?
Some of you are nodding along, thinking, Of course. But unless you’re working at a small startup, I don’t believe you. I believe that you believe you know how things work. But our mental models are fuzzy, incomplete, and always a snapshot in time of an ever-changing codebase.
For most engineers, the systems they work on are just one piece of a sprawling puzzle. They own service A, but dependent services B, C, and D are managed by entirely different teams. In the best-case scenario, teams collaborate closely; In the worst (or, let’s be honest, the typical) case, they might as well be separate companies.
Even in startups, where engineers work across the full codebase, change happens too fast to keep track of everything. The way two services interact might have been updated, reviewed, and merged before you even realise it.
Hidden Risks Break Prod
The complexity and separation of modern software breeds real, costly problems:
Data leaks— an internal helper function ends up exposed in a user-facing API, because a developer didn’t know it was meant to be internal.
Critical failures—because someone dropped an "unused" table that another team still depends on.
Performance degradations— a simple-looking PR introduces an expensive query that only surfaces under real production load.
These aren’t hypothetical scenarios. They’re real incidents we’ve heard from customers—incidents that have led to 2 A.M. wake-ups, millions in lost revenue, regulatory fines, and user goodwill flushed down the toilet.
A great deal of effort is expended globally to prevent these sort of situations, but most solutions take atomic approaches to detecting incident-causing risks: they scan code in isolation, ignoring the context from the rest of your system.
Atomic scanning can’t help with many of the incidents that occur in large production systems. The crux of these problems is that information is fragmented, split across codebases, left in the lead engineer’s head, stored in some forgotten document in Notion - or was it Slack, or a GitHub comment….?
A frustrating fact is that the necessary information exists. Many incidents can be prevented if the right information can be connected with the right person.
As software has grown in complexity and scope, so too do these problems of information flow, which we just accept as a natural and unavoidable consequence of scale.
We’re building Rover to say balls to that - it’s not unavoidable.
Meet Rover: incident prevention, built into your workflow
Rover is a platform to help teams understand their software, to prevent incidents before they make it into production. Rover maps your repo end-to-end, identifies entry and exit points to link it to other repos in your codebase, and uses this combined context to understand how production issues arise across your system working as a whole.
Our first product scans pull requests for issues it might introduce on your systems - compliance risks; performance degradation; security risks; misapplied application logic; and more.
How it works
Say a developer modifies a database query in a PR. The schema probably isn’t co-located with the query code—maybe it’s even in a different repo. This makes it easy to miss potential issues, or act on outdated assumptions about the schema. Where else is this query used? How is the data returned by the query exposed to end-users? Is there appropriate indexing on the table? The answer to these questions alters the validity of the code change, but when you’re reviewing the PR you have none of that information available to you.
Connect Rover to your codebase and it will connect the dots. It:
Identifies the relevant database schema from across the codebases.
Scans the query in the PR in the context of that schema definition.
Flags issues on the PR, such as missing indexes that could tank production performance.
Rover Roadmap
PR scans are just the start. We've got a packed roadmap that will shortly take Rover to every stage in the development flow.
Track risks from PRs, to staging, to production. Following alerts across merges, Rover can run a final CI/CD scan of all new risks before your next release. You’ll get a single, connected view of risks, and can track their lineage back to their origin - whether introduced by a single PR or a confluence of multiple.
Fully explorable code graphs. See PRs as a visual diff, spot clusters of alerts, and understand service-to-service dependencies at a glance. You will be able to use these graphs to answer specific questions about your codebases, onboard onto a new area, or better understand the hotspots of problem areas in your code.
Learning from the past. By integrating with your monitoring stack, Rover will use past incidents and real production behaviour to better identify potential future risks specific to your environment.
But that's just a small part of what we've got planned. To be frank, there’s so much we can build to help prevent incidents that we need your input on what comes next.
Join the Open Beta
Rover is available now in open beta:
Unlimited codebases
Unlimited team members
Free to get started, then just $30/month per team (locked in for early adopters)
Try Rover today at app.getrover.com. Connect your codebase in two clicks and start catching risks before they become incidents.
We’re in beta, which means there’s plenty to improve. Bugs to squash. Features to refine. Tell us what risks keep you up at night—we’re building Rover for you.
Help us help you prevent incidents before they happen.
With love,
The Rover Team
Ship fast; break nothing.
Exciting times ahead!