“When we onboard a developer we send them on Scala courses, and that teaches them some of the basics behind Scala, but Codacy augments that.”

About Schneider Electric

Schneider Electric is a huge multinational corporation whose core business is electrical equipment for the grid.

Within the software group at Schneider, there’s a simulation group.

We spoke with Johan Prinsloo, who is tech lead on their cloud-based simulation platform.

The platform and the workflow

The platform this team is working on simulates the physics behind Industrial processes like Power Plants; these simulations are used to gain insights on plants’ efficiency, increase said efficiency, solve problems, and also to train new people against a simulated environment instead of training them against a real power plant (which could be dangerous).

Their project uses Scala with Akka, Cassandra and Spray.

The team follows a classic gitflow where each feature has its own branch.

When the developers of a feature feel that it is ready they create a Pull Request. Codacy analyses the Pull Request and then the team also reviews the code.

When everyone is happy with the result the code is merged.

Onboarding developers

Johan tells us that everyone they hired so far has been new to Scala; luckily, they’re using Codacy:

“When we onboard a developer we send them on Scala courses, and that teaches them some of the basics behind Scala, but Codacy augments that.”

“It gives the whole team good feedback on Scala Code Best Practices, so it educates and it also saves you some time by always bringing up the routine issues.”

Saving time in Code Reviews

For every Pull Request, Johan estimates savings of up to 2 hours.

“What we like about Codacy is that it gets the routine stuff out of the way.”

Not just that, but it also helps keep the team sane:

“The stuff that for a human would look repetitive, Codacy takes that out for us.”

Code Quality with Codacy

When Codacy was brought in, the team gained very useful insights on their code quality. Suddenly, there were metrics:

“Codacy has helped us measure Code Quality.”

Before, most of the project had a grade of D-F. Nowadays, about a year later, every single file in the project has either an A or a B (which is very good).

Final Words

As for many of our clients, the major advantages for Schneider Electric revolve around higher Code Quality, having the team learn best practices, and saving time in Code Reviews.

The best thing about Codacy in Johan’s opinion:

“Education for new Scala developers.”

He also had something else to say about us:

“Codacy is like the code mother we never had.”