Luminare, a health care startup with patented, award-winning solution helps hospitals better diagnose sepsis and develop treatment plans. Marcus Rydberg, Luminare’s co-founder and CTO shares his thoughts on how CodeScene contributed to their success story.
Challenge - reducing cognitive load and decreasing technical debt
CodeScene helps CTOs manage their software portfolio
As a CTO, Marcus is responsible for both the quality of Luminare's software products and the quality of their codebase. To make sure that their software meets their code quality standards, it was important to have an overview of all of Luminare's products and an easy way to identify projects that were doing really well and those that needed attention.
"For me, the most impressive and most helpful thing with CodeScene is that we were able to get to high code quality without having to do any major rewrites or replace team members. We achieved this just by adapting to CodeScene's rules. So over time, using CodeScene resulted in very big and positive outcomes for our organization, which is a huge win for our team and makes me as CTO, very happy."
Onboarding new developers and building a scalable organization
Minimizing cognitive load
Finding a way to reduce cognitive load was important for Luminare. They wanted to prevent team burnout and keep the cognitive load light in order to sustainably grow their team. CodeScene helped with this. CodeScene's Code Age analysis provided a powerful and evolutionary view of their system. It helped Luminaire evolve their codebase in a way that also resulted in a more stable and maintainable system.
Luminare could now reduce cognitive load in a systematic way, which is something they haven’t been able to do before. This set the stage for scalable and controlled growth.
For junior and new developers, reducing cognitive load meant there was less code to understand and work with. This not only improved the onboarding experience for new developers but it also boosted their confidence as they could start making contributions to the codebase sooner.
For senior developers, the improved and more efficient onboarding experience, meant less time spent on supporting new and more junior developers. They could now spend more time on building new features.
Once you fix a specific issue, reduce the size and complexity of the file or refactor a key piece of code, it feels so rewarding to pass the controls and know that you are contributing to quality improvement. It’s reshaped our approach where we’re not willing to take shortcuts and want all future features to have a positive impact on the health of our codebase."
Improving Knowledge Distribution
To mitigate the risk of having situations where everything is in the mind of one key developer, CodeScene points out Knowledge Islands, or areas of code that only one developer is familiar with. It then goes to show which of those Knowledge Islands are in complex code that poses a higher risk in case that key developer leaves the project.
This allows planning ahead and onboarding new developers to get familiar with that code and be able to maintain and evolve it. This approach greatly reduces the risk of knowledge loss for the company.
Improve knowledge distribution
CodeScene enabled Luminare to systematically track code quality of all of their projects and understand how well knowledge is shared within their teams. It helps make the right decisions and grow software development efforts in a way that makes business sense. These decisions take into account cost, risk and complexity of different software projects.
“In an early start-up stage, you often have situations where everything is in the mind of one key developer. However, you get to a point when that is no longer sustainable and becomes a real risk to the growth and potential of the company. You get to that point you need a reliable tool to guide you.”
Using CodeScene metrics to frame code quality discussions
CodeScene enabled Marcus to have a holistic overview, look at the metrics, and have relevant discussions with his team about technical debt and what needs to be prioritized.
Code quality and refactoring discussions were no longer based on feelings or opinions, but real and objective metrics and indicators.
CodeScene became a common, shared ground, enabling everybody in the team to work towards the same goal.
Now, Senior Engineers can easily follow up with their teams and with the help of the tool, show the exact lines of code that need to be refactored.
This saves time and improves the experience for everyone, since CodeScene both points out the issues and also gives suggestions and refactoring examples.
Saving time with automated code reviews
With CodeScene’s Automated Code Reviews, senior developers are able to redirect time they were spending on code reviews to actually building new features.
CodeScene serves as a virtual teammate, both educating junior developers and helping them fix code quality issues before merging to the main branch and also preventing senior engineers from drowning in code reviews.
When it comes to code quality, Luminare is no longer willing to take any shortcuts and want all future features to improve the quality of their product.
In line with this strategy, Luminare would rather spend a little extra time fixing an issue if Quality Gates fail, instead of having to do rework later when the feature is released. Accruing technical debt is costly as the interest on that poor code quality is also accrued.
Automate code reviews
The importance of understanding the state of your software
Marcus suggests that more organizations should start analyzing the state of their software and commit to quality. In the end, it is good for business and saves money in the long run.
Marcus points out that this is really important if you are investing in a software company. As an investor, you need to understand what you are investing in and what it will take to actually maintain and scale that software.
There is a big difference between a codebase that has been massively neglected and sprinted upon for many years compared to a codebase where good code quality has been the leading star.“
Summary of the results
Improving Code Health and Code Quality
Luminare’s most difficult project, which was written quickly and grew too fast, went from having poor quality and a lot of instability to an average Code Health of 9.3.
Saving Time in Code Reviews and Reducing Cognitive Load
With CodeScene’s Automated Code Reviews, senior developers were able to redirect time they used to spend on code reviews to actually building new features.
Mitigate Knowledge Gaps
CodeScene enabled Luminare to systematically track code quality of all of their projects and understand how well knowledge is shared within their teams.
About Luminare
