“We are dealing with at least 500-550 repos on average, which are regularly being updated. So, there needs to be an MPL-wide standard, and Codacy is central to organizing that standardization process.”

MPL Customer Story 

About MPL

MPL is a leading mobile eSports and digital gaming platform that allows users to participate in free and paid competitions across 60+ games in multiple categories, including fantasy sports, sports games, puzzles, casual and board games. MPL hosts hundreds of millions of tournaments a month and is trusted by over 90 million registered users across Asia, Europe, and North America.

The main programming languages used by MPL development team are Go, Python, Java, JavaScript, Swift, and Unity. They use Bitbucket as their version control system.

Challenge

With a keen understanding of the importance of code quality and reliability, MPL is taking steps to proactively reduce any tech debt it may have accumulated during the early days. Pratyush 

“There is not enough time when a company starts out. So as with all the startups across the world, engineering practices often take a toll. And once your product is successful, you start looking back, and then you realize that you have a plethora of tech debt that you have left behind in the making of the business,” said Kumar Pratyush, staff developer experience engineer at MPL.  

To address this, MPL embarked on a search for a static code analysis solution that would help them tackle tech debt and improve the overall efficiency of its development team. The company also sought to gain a deeper understanding of the coverage and quality of their code. The solution needed to be compatible with the various programming languages they use at MPL.

“When we talk about efficiency, we wanted something which we could integrate with a one-click solution, and it would start scanning, analyzing all our repositories, irrespective of the languages, and then start giving us these metrics (…), and it can provide quality gates with respect to our coverage metrics, as well. That’s the biggest USP [unique selling proposition] we have with Codacy," Pratyush said. 

With Codacy

Tools like Codacy Quality help engineering managers and their development teams improve efficiency. The goal is to make their job easier and help them achieve engineering excellence. The feedback these tools provide needs to be right on the spot, when the developer changes or adds a new piece of code, not later on. Plus, the feedback needs to be actionable so developers can promptly improve their code.

"There are a few other products in the market (...), and they would spend forever to give you the metrics, and by then the PR is already merged (...) it just becomes a report, it becomes useless, nobody is going to look back once the train goes out of the station," said Pratyush.

Code standardization across projects and teams was one of the building blocks for the development efficiency that MPL aimed to achieve. Codacy Quality helped them with this process. 

“We are dealing with at least 500-550 repos on average, which are regularly being updated (…) So, there needs to be an MPL-wide standard, and Codacy is central to organizing that standardization process. I can set up the rules in one place, which affects all the repositories,” he said. 

Having the standards in a centralized tool is particularly beneficial when several developers contribute to the same repository, as is the MPL case. Plus, having coding standards in place will improve the overall quality of the code. 

“That has been really, really fruitful for us in our React repos. It’s driven from Codacy and primarily uses ESLint, and on PRs, any ESLint violation or failure, the PR is blocked; it is not merged. So for React repos, we have reached the position where we are not introducing any more code smells; we are at effectively zero code smell," Pratyush added. 

Future

The next step for MPL is to expand its usage of Codacy Quality and aim at bolder goals. Starting using Codacy Pulse is also on the horizon for MPL. Pulse allows teams to measure the DORA metrics, allowing them to identify their level of performance in speed and quality of development.

Codacy Quality and Codacy Pulse are the perfect combination for teams wanting to improve their practices and achieve engineering excellence. Together, they can give you all the insights you need and bring you even better results. 

"Once we combine our analysis from Codacy Quality with the productivity data from Pulse, that is when developer experience and engineering productivity as a whole becomes more powerful," Pratyush concluded.