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Bizzomate optimizes app development with new Guidify app
Defining proper guidelines that specify technical agreements is crucial for building high-quality apps that offer a consistent user experience. But how do you ensure that all these guidelines are properly followed by every member of your development team? By developing a low-code app that automatically checks if this is the case.
Therefore Bizzomate created ‘Guidify’, an application built on the Mendix low-code platform and utilizing the Mendix Model SDK that shows all cases where the guidelines are not met or where extra attention is needed.
Peer reviews time consuming
Bizzomate performs peer reviews to check if the code that was written meets all the requirements for naming, security, performance and maintenance.
Jelle Dekker, Solution Consultant at Bizzomate: “We want to guarantee that our applications meet the highest standards. This means we always check the code written by our colleagues. We noticed that many of the mistakes were caused by not complying with the standard guidelines for building the app. Correcting these minor mistakes manually was time-consuming and distracted us from focusing on the elements that can really improve the quality of the application, like the architecture.”
Luc Rosenbrand, Solution Consultant at Bizzomate: “When I heard my colleagues discuss the tedious task of manually checking if the code complied with all the guidelines, I came up with the idea that we could save time by developing an application that automatically performs those checks. We decided to develop it during one of our so-called ‘FedEx-sessions’, gatherings in which a group of 4 people develop an application within 24 hours. The application we developed enabled us to automatically detect small guideline deviations.”
Global back-office application
At that time Jelle Dekker was just building a back-office application for a client that operated globally and that wanted a standard global application that operated the same way in every country. He remembered the application developed by Luc and his team and decided that it would be a perfect tool to assist the developers in building this application. He decided to revive the application and to slightly modify and adapt it. The result was ‘Guidify’.
Working on new initiatives
Jelle Dekker: “The great thing about working at Bizzomate is that it gives its employees time to solve a problem as soon as they experience it. We are allowed to spend 20 percent of our time on initiatives like Guidify, that can improve the efficiency of our organisation. Developing this app has really improved the speed of our performance checks during peer reviews.”
Automated checks
“Guidify now identifies all code that doesn’t comply with app guidelines. That forces us to make clear agreements on things like naming, but it improves the security of our applications as well. We get notified by Guidify if we forget to adapt access rights for instance. Less experienced developers also benefit because it shows them exactly what needs to be iterated. Solving their own mistakes is a very educational experience for them. Because Guidify now performs all these checks automatically we can review each other’s code more efficiently and focus on really improving the quality of the code within our development team”, says Dekker.
Adding notifications and ratings
Bizzomate wants to extend the functionality of the application even further in the future. “Now we still have to run Guidify manually but for future applications, we plan to run it automatically. We will also add automated notifications when code changes are made and the option to rate mistakes differently. This enables us to rate a security issue higher than a naming issue allowing us to keep a score for the code that is written. One thing is certain the Guidify app has truly improved the quality of applications for us and for our clients.”
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