Case Study: Atlantis Interactive

... 5,990 hours saved. If that task had been assigned to a Junior Developer on a $15/hour rate, the cost saving could roughly be equated to $89,850. Or, in other terms CodeIt.Right paid for itself more than 100 times over.

Having looked at some of the static analysis tools ... CodeIt.Right was the only tool that we found that gave us the ability to adapt it to our chosen coding standard, rather than having to adapt our coding standard to suit the tool.

About Atlantis Interactive UK

Atlantis Interactive UK (www.atlantis-interactive.co.uk) is a company formed to enhance the toolsets available for SQL Server users around the globe, increasing the quality of tools available while lowering the cost of ownership considerably.

What led you to look for an analysis tool?

Atlantis was formed over a long period of time, mostly through coding in evenings and weekends while 'keeping the day job'. This lead to a slightly less formal approach in terms of design, but the main area that suffered was coding conventions and style. When we looked at the overall picture, we realised we had a code repository that contained 642,112 lines of code in 3,041 files, and was in need of a lot of refactoring. When considering how to approach this, we estimated that each code file would take around 2 hours to refactor, including testing, check-in and accounting for human error in the process.

Why CodeIt.Right?

Having looked at some of the static analysis tools, we decided upon CodeIt.Right because of it's huge flexibility in terms of being able to support custom code rules in order to support renaming of items. It was the only tool that we found that gave us the ability to adapt it to our chosen coding standard, rather than having to adapt our coding standard to suit the tool. Another important factor was renaming within XML comments, which the refactoring built in to Visual Studio completely misses. Of course, the fact that the design guidelines are included are a great benefit, and will support us as the size of the team increases.

What was the best part?

At Atlantis, we are big fans of automation - if a program can be written to do a job that you would have to do more than twice, then that program has a benefit. The fact that CodeIt.Right provided automation over such a vast array of items was just fantastic and fitted in with our ethos exactly.

What was the most challenging part?

In relative terms, the coding of custom rules to exactly support our naming conventions - however it would be a stretch of the imagination to call them 'challenging'. It was actually fun, because the ratio of amount of effort required to the rewards was absolutely brilliant. Literally every keypress was worth thousands of keypresses of manual work saved.

How much did CodeIt.Right save?

We will never know if our estimate of 2 hours per file was correct... But assuming it was, we would have spent 6,082 hours refactoring our code base. With CodeIt.Right, we spent 8 hours writing custom rules, 2 hours refactoring, 2 hours checking in, and 80 hours re-testing (even though it quickly became apparent that the re-testing wasn't going to throw up any surprises). So we spent 92 hours getting our entire code base sorted - that would equate to 5,990 hours saved. If that task had been assigned to a Junior Developer on a $15/hour rate, the cost saving could roughly be equated to $89,850. Or, in other terms CodeIt.Right paid for itself more than 100 times over.

What other improvements were made?

The performance suggestions included in CodeIt.Right proved to be a big plus for us, as we are very performance-oriented. Also, the design rules alerted us to a number potential problems with our code that we were able to quickly pinpoint and correct, as well as giving us the benefit of being aware of these issues for our next design iterations.

Would you recommend CodeIt.Right?

We already have! It has been a huge benefit to our company, and has allowed us to really focus on the parts of application creation that are important to us. I would say that anyone could make a great use of CodeIt.Right, whether they have an existing code base or not.

 

Matt Whitfield (Atlantis Interactive)
atlantis-interactive.co.uk