Recognyte

the challenge

Recognyte is a property-tech company that has combined years of real estate knowledge alongside artificial intelligence and large-scale data collection to ease property management with its SaaS products. They have three different products - ActiveEstate, DataScout, and AssetDynamics - and use four main languages - Golang, Python, JavaScript, and PHP - in their technology stack.

Before SonarCloud, Recognyte manually wrote unit tests that measured the code coverage for a repository, but due to the number of repositories (100+), they had to build from scratch or find a more general solution for their code coverage efforts to continue to evolve. They would fix known bugs or vulnerabilities, but they couldn’t be sure if there were any undetected bugs yet to be discovered. In essence, they were unable to measure the code quality of their projects, lacked a holistic view, and couldn’t make future development plans.

Additionally, they couldn’t guarantee that they weren’t introducing issues or security vulnerabilities into production within their CI/CD pipeline. They were in need of a code quality tool that could provide them with analysis reports for all of their new code, enable them to deliver their new code to production at a certain standard, and help them improve the code quality of all of their projects.

the solution

After extensive research and analysis, Recognyte chose SonarCloud because it aligned with their code stack and Sonar’s integration with GitHub. At first, the development teams had concerns that implementing SonarCloud would reduce their developer productivity and slow down their processes during implementation and ongoing usage.

To help address these concerns, Furkan Yavuz, QA lead for Recognyte, selected three repositories from different stacks as a starting point and completed all the necessary configurations in SonarCloud to put the new tool to the test. When the teams encountered SonarCloud analysis results with each of their pull requests in the version control system, they immediately began improving their code quality by examining the analysis results without any specific guidance from leadership.

This was truly motivating for the developers, so they conducted individual meetings with each team and explained the tool to everyone. Once all teams recognized the benefits of SonarCloud and came on board, they introduced SonarCloud to all of their active projects.

“After we had a look into more advanced configuration in SonarCloud, we found that almost everything could be adjusted for our specific needs, so the SonarCloud Quality Gate feature has been a benefit for us, not a bottleneck.” - Kostiantyn Osichenko, Technical Lead at Recognyte.

Due to their large number of repositories guidance was provided for each team explaining how the configurations should be done. Additionally, they created a SonarCloud Implementation Board page in Confluence to track this process.

They also set a Branch Protection rule in Github by adding SonarCloud code quality checks to automatically block code that fails SonarCloud analysis results. This action has been the key to keeping their code clean and up to standards with the use of their Quality Gates.

The results

Since adopting SonarCloud as their Clean Code solution, they are analyzing more than 400K lines of code and have over 120 projects in SonarCloud. This has allowed them to gain valuable insights into the quality of their code repositories and improved their overall code standards.

The result has been an increase in code quality and developer productivity with a more reliable and secure software development process. Like many customers, Recognyte started to see an immediate return on investment when using Sonar.