ASSOCIATION OF METADATA WITH SOURCE CODE AND APPLICATIONS AND SERVICES PREMISED THEREON

Systems and methods are described that enable metadata to be associated with source code at various levels of granularity (e.g., at the level of files, classes, functions, lines, statements and expressions) and that enable such metadata to be accessed independently of the source code with which it is associated. Such metadata may be used to track provenance and history of source code within and across source code repositories, associate ratings or other indicia of quality or reliability with source code, wherein such ratings may be exposed to developers and wherein such ratings may be used to better manage the automated check-in, testing and analysis of source code, and facilitate a process by which a component that manages a source code entity is notified about updates made to a related source code entity and by which like changes may be to the source code entity in a manual or automated fashion.