풀스택 서비스 프로그래밍

Google이 전세계 1억5천만명이 사용하는 Google Classroom을 2년에 걸쳐 Flutter로 재개발 완료 했습니다.

[기사] Cross Platform development with Flutter — How Google Classroom gets teachers and students on the same page 

이유과 과정, 그리고 효과에 대해서 아주 깔끔하게 정리하고 있네요.

특히 효과를 정량적으로 정리했는데, 시간이 없다면, 아래의 결론 부분만 읽어 두는 것도 도움이 되겠습니다.

Developer experience

The only people made happier by increased developer velocity than stakeholders is — the developers themselves. For the Classroom team, their 3x increase in velocity came from a mixture of only writing each feature once (or at most, 1.5 times in scenarios with heavy native components), eliminating the costs of coordination for two teams whose schedules were often months apart and, of course, hot reload. Hot reload alone, with its ~99% reduction in rebuild times, buoyed the Classroom team’s morale above where it had ever been with their two native clients. In the end, the Classroom team found it easy to attract and retain engineers after their switch to Flutter. Additionally, the Classroom team found that new features, on average, required at least 50% fewer lines of code to implement. In reality, the decrease is likely quite a bit higher, since not every feature that they built during the rewrite was even properly implemented in the two native clients! Put differently, 50% as many lines of code delivered all the old features, plus coverage of large feature gaps (including offline support on iOS). 

Conclusion

Roughly two years after beginning their rewrite, the Classroom team has shipped their app to Android and iOS and added enough additional features to pay down 40% of their upfront investment. Their new app launches almost five times as fast as the old, saving both developers and end-users time and frustration. Looking forward, new features average one-third the development cost in comparison to the old status quo, enjoy simultaneous release on both platforms, and are easier to troubleshoot and maintain. Ultimately, user, developer, and stakeholder morale has never been higher than it became after Classroom switched to Flutter to reinvest in their future.