ConfigCat

The challenge

ConfigCat is a cloud-based solution for feature flagging - a service that enables software companies to release features without code deployments. The small, high-performance and efficient engineering team was faced with the challenge of maintaining high code quality and security across a multitude of programming languages. The need for a robust, maintenance-free tool to manage and analyze their codebase was non-negotiable. As their suite of SDKs expanded and their B2B customer base diversified, ensuring a high-performing, error-free, and secure product was not just an aspiration but a strict, organization-wide requirement, especially considering their ISO 27001 certification.

The solution

After vetting various competitors and based on positive peer recommendations, ConfigCat chose Sonar’s SaaS solution, as the need to minimize the time spent on maintaining an on-premise solution was paramount for the small, agile engineering team at ConfigCat.  SonarQube Cloud's seamless integration with the company’s development environment and its compatibility with numerous IDEs meant that the tool could fit into the engineers’ workflow with minimal disruption, offering early and proactive issue detection.

SonarQube Cloud is a secure and scalable code analysis SaaS solution built on top of AWS cloud services. It integrates with popular DevOps platforms like Amazon CodeCatalyst, GitHub, and GitLab to analyze code and identify maintainability, reliability, and security issues on every merge/pull request. Leveraging services like Amazon S3, AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB, SonarQube Cloud allows customers to build high-quality, secure applications faster within their DevOps processes.

For the ConfigCat engineering team, the SonarQube Cloud solution stood out due to the following factors:

• Maintenance-free operation: Allowing the team to concentrate on development rather than tool upkeep.
• IDE Integration: Offering real-time code quality feedback within the development process.
• Comprehensive support for programming languages: Covering all programming languages used by ConfigCat, ensuring a universal standard of code quality.
• Continuous Updates and Innovative Features: Keeping the tool aligned with the latest developments in programming languages and industry standards. Not only does this improve the static code analysis, but also enables engineers to continuously learn. 
• The pricing model of SonarQube Cloud, which did not limit usage based on the number of team members, mirrored ConfigCat’s own customer-friendly pricing strategy, making it an aligned business choice.

The results

ConfigCat's investment in SonarQube Cloud yielded immediate returns. The tool's impact was starkly visible when the team saw the comprehensive code quality reports - a sea of red in the initial stages, signifying the potential risks and errors present in the codebase. By fine-tuning the SonarQube Cloud Quality Gates and making a commitment to code health metrics, ConfigCat has since ensured that all new code is compliant with no new bugs entering the production environment, as well as all existing technical debt is proactively and strategically managed. 

The time savings have been substantial. ConfigCat has effectively bypassed the traditional, labor-intensive code review process, leaning on SonarQube Cloud to automatically analyze and vet new code. This automation has been crucial for a small team managing an extensive codebase across multiple languages.

In conclusion, SonarQube Cloud has not only enhanced ConfigCat's development workflow but has also fortified its product's trustworthiness with its clients. It stands as an essential tool, integral to their promise of delivering high-quality, reliable, and secure software solutions.