EcoStruxure IT by Schneider Electric
Schneider Electric is building an app called EcoStruxure IT that enables IT users to mitigate and anticipate the risk of failure of their critical infrastructure while reducing operational expenses delivered through or built on an open, vendor-agnostic platform.
EcoStruxure IT is mainly written in Dart using the Flutter framework. “We do have native parts as well when we interact with sensors or use geofencing. On Android, that is implemented in Java, and on iOS, it is implemented in Swift, but we also depend on plugins implemented in Kotlin and Objective-C,” explained Kresten P. Vester, who is a Senior Software Engineer at Schneider Electric.
Migrating from Nevercode to Codemagic CI/CD
Schneider Electric was using Nevercode before migrating to Codemagic. “We needed a CI/CD tool to make us as efficient as possible. Our developers should spend their time on building features without necessarily needing to know the whole toolchain of packaging apps, signing them, and uploading to stores. Furthermore, when migrating to Flutter, we needed something that could make sure that our changes work on both iOS and Android,” said Kresten, who also added: “Codemagic was optimized for Flutter, and the UI approach for setting up builds seemed appealing.”
According to Kresten, the Schneider Electric team was most impressed with the effective support and help they received from Codemagic customer support when migrating from Nevercode to Codemagic.
An app with 500+ tests that run for every build
The EcoStruxure IT team consists of four developers. The app itself is not a standalone product but is rather a part of a bigger SaaS offer by Schneider Electric.
“Our team is responsible for the app, but we also work on other parts of our platform. So the amount of builds varies. We automatically trigger builds when we create pull requests and when we make changes to these pull requests. Our app contains 500+ tests that run for every build,” explained Kresten.
Using the Codemagic YAML file
“Initially, the learning curve is, of course, harder than clicking around in the UI. But it is well documented, and once I got used to it, it gave me a better overview and made it easier to do more custom stuff. We have more custom jobs. One of the jobs automatically uploads files for translations once a week that do not require all the elements of a full app build. That becomes simpler when using the codemagic.yaml file,” said Kresten.
Codemagic.yaml is an advanced option for customizing the build and configuring all your workflows in a single file. This file can be committed to version control, and when it is detected in the repository, it will be referenced to configure the build (instead of using the settings in the UI).
Read more about EcoStruxure IT from their website or take a look at other success stories:
