DevPartner is a Healthy Part of Nestle's Menu for Application Development

The world’s largest food and beverage maker has an international R&D infrastructure. Its nerve center relies on DevPartner Studio to cook up code that is reliable and secure.

The name Nestlé is synonymous with sweet treats, evoking images of candy bars and hot chocolate. Less-well known is the fact that the company was founded by Henri Nestlé after he created the first milk food for infants in 1867. Mr. Nestlé’s first product saved the life of a neighbor’s child, and the company he founded is now committed to focusing significant resources on the nutritional needs of the world’s growing population.

DevPartner has made our code much better and more reliable. It is very easy to use, and it is used daily during the development process. —Goran Kukic, NRC IT Manager

The catalyst for the company’s quest to address current and future nutrition issues is the Nestlé R&D Network, an international collection of more than 20 sites and 3,500 researchers. The nerve center of the network is the Nestlé Research Center (NRC) in Lausanne, Switzerland. Approximately 600 scientists—including 280 PhDs—from more than 35 countries work at the facility. The NRC is involved in projects studying various aspects of nutrition, from raw materials and food technology to the digestion process and how foods are metabolized. The knowledge gathered by NRC researchers is applied to new products, and its findings are used by the other labs throughout the Nestlé R&D Network.

"The NRC plays a central role as a generator of scientific knowledge," says Goran Kukic, an information technology manager at the NRC. "It feeds the science and technology pipeline for all Nestlé products."

Developing Food, Beverage and Applications

An IT team of approximately 15 people supports the scientists and lab technicians working at the NRC. The service-oriented IT department develops both desktop and web applications to aid in the gathering and storage of research data. The desktop applications developed are used primarily for data acquisition and analysis, while the web applications are usually database-driven repositories of information used on the NRC’s intranet.

The biggest IT problem faced by the NRC team was application testing. "We try to test our applications as much as possible, but we don’t have a team dedicated solely to testing," says Kukic. "We also face a wide palette of application types that we must support internally."

Since the IT team at the NRC does not have to support outside customers or consumers, downtime primarily affects the progress of internal research and the dissemination of information. But the team was facing concerns about performance and security, as well as hoping to install a series of best practices. Kukic’s team set out looking for a solution in 2003, and that search led them to Compuware and its DevPartner product.

A Daily Dose of DevPartner

The NRC considered several options for its interactive testing needs, including some free solutions for code analysis. But the group’s search ended at a Microsoft conference, where a speaker offered strong praise for DevPartner Studio. On this recommendation, the IT team put the code review feature through a trial run at the NRC. The results were impressive, and a decision was made.

"We started using DevPartner about nine months ago," Kukic says. "At the beginning, we used it to test finished applications and make corrections to comply with the standards proposed by the tool. We bought the product to perform code analyses, and we have attained the level of performance we expected."

The IT team then made a discovery that the scientists at the NRC could appreciate: DevPartner was capable of doing even more, including identifying performance bottlenecks at runtime.

"We realized that DevPartner could help us in making our applications faster, to test our applications better and to make them more secure," Kukic says. "Now we analyze our code for best coding practices and security issues, and we are using it all the time in the development process. The integration between DevPartner and the Visual Studio .NET development environment is phenomenal."

The work done at the NRC has implications for every product made by Nestlé, the world’s largest food and beverage company. But due to the internal nature of the projects, the financial impact of the NRC’s use of DevPartner is not easily measured. Kukic, however, is able to quantify DevPartner’s value by the results his IT team continues to produce.

"DevPartner has made our code much better and more reliable," Kukic says. "It is very easy to use, and it is used daily during the development process."