"Being able to implement Codacy across projects, view the quality of projects, the quality of the code, the code smells, all the linter rules... All of that on a single page, and across all of the organization, it's really exciting."

About Bliss Applications

Bliss Applications creates digital products for the various needs of their world-class clients, within different industries. Bliss Applications is part of the WYgroup, one of Portugal's largest digital marketing groups.

The main programming languages used by Bliss Applications' development team are C#, JavaScript, Swift, and Kotlin. In addition, they use GitHub as their version control system.

Challenge

Bliss Applications was looking for a solution to improve their development processes and the quality of their code. They also felt the need to have coding standards to help them maintain a consistent and readable codebase.

As Diogo Cunha, CTO at Bliss, explained: "Having an engineering service of excellence is the goal that led us to go for a tool like Codacy. We needed to maintain standards in check as the team grows and have some refinement on the KPIs that allow us to go about our thought process."

At Bliss Applications, linters were being used in every project. However, linters might not be the best choice for long-term or for more sophisticated software development. They can be difficult to manage, and there might not be standardization across the organization.

As Nuno confessed: "People were encouraged to use these linters, but there was not a standard that was applied across the entire company. So it was a bit difficult to manage and to have an idea of how good the quality of the code is, and the number Of issues and code smells that existed on each project (...) It was very manual. So it was complicated."

Bliss Applications understood they needed a centralized approach, and they came across with Codacy.

With Codacy

Code standardization across projects and teams was one of the building blocks for the engineering service of excellence that Bliss Applications aimed to achieve. Codacy helped them with this process.

As Nuno stated, "The fact that we could create a standard that was applied across projects, meaning that we have visibility of what were the rules that were implemented for all the projects, and having that set up equally for projects from the same technology stack, it was a big advantage (...) So we have company-wide quality and rule bases for all projects."

The visibility provided by Codacy is a big plus for Bliss Applications. They see having all the information in the same place as a significant advantage. People's time on code reviews has also decreased because Codacy will flag them if something goes wrong or is not up to standards.

With more and more projects and people being onboard to Codacy, the tool is an integral part of the development process at Bliss Applications. It's a very straightforward tool to use, and developers are seeing the benefits of using Codacy. Quoting Nuno, "Everyone is using it without an issue. Some people are now asking to join (...) So I think that bit by bit, people are starting to understand the importance of this, and some people may be talking to each other and are starting to feel the need also to have this tool."

Developers are pleased with Codacy because the tool allows them to write better code while maintaining peace of mind. They know that Codacy will flag them if something goes wrong and will even give them suggestions on how to improve. As Nuno commented: “There is a general appreciation [for the tool]. But people also find it interesting that Codacy adds comments to analyzed commits on GitHub. After a few Seconds, you have not only your code analyzed in terms of issues but also comments on each issue and how to solve them directly on GitHub on each PR."

Future

The next step for Bliss Applications is to expand their usage of Codacy to even more teams working on different projects. It's also time to aim at bolder goals and unlock the full potential of using a tool like Codacy.

We look forward to seeing what Bliss Applications accomplishes in its mission of helping clients follow their bliss. Always with an engineering service of excellence in mind.