VanMoof’s engineering team accelerates updates for electric bicycle software

The challenge

The electric bikes created by VanMoof, a company based in Amsterdam, operate their best when the firmware running the bikes is kept fresh and up to date. That’s the job of Enrico Berti, Head of Software Engineering for VanMoof. He’s also charged with managing the budget and resources for the engineering department, which is a relatively small one.

“Maintaining quality and speed can be challenging for a software engineering team with a leaner organization, as there may be fewer resources and less room for error,” Berti explains. “We need effective management and efficient use of resources, as well as clear communication and collaboration among team members.” Automation also helps, Berti added, since it can streamline software development processes and ensure that the engineering team delivers high-quality software in a timely manner.

CI/CD is a key part of Berti’s plan for the engineering department’s success. “It’s important for any company that develops software, but it’s especially important for a company that develops and commercializes a connected e-bike – a market where technology is rapidly evolving and the competition is fierce,” Berti says.

The solution

VanMoof’s engineering team had been using Travis, Jenkins, Bitrise, and GitHub Actions for CI/CD, but none of those solutions gave the team a centralized location for builds. “It was the utter fragmentation of the CI/CD landscape that we had in place that made us realize none of those solutions fit the bill,” Berti says.

The search for a new CI/CD solution focused on scalability, integrations, customization, ease of use, security, and support. “The platform would need to integrate with our existing tools and technologies, be easy to use and set up, provide robust security features, and offer adequate support and documentation,” Berti said. In addition, he and the team considered various solutions’ compliance, reporting, and analytics capabilities.

In addition to meeting these requirements, CircleCI’s user-friendly interface impressed the VanMoof engineering team. “CircleCI is highly configurable and we can use it with a wide range of programming languages, frameworks, and tools, making it a versatile choice for many different types of projects,” Berti says.

“CircleCI makes it easy for us to scale our continuous integration and delivery processes as projects grow, which allows us to handle larger projects and more users.”

Enrico Berti
Head of Software Engineering at VanMoof

How CircleCI powers VanMoof’s business

As the engineering team expected, CircleCI has improved the speed of building, testing, and deployment.

“Having one centralized technology also helps massively with knowledge sharing between teams, which is incredibly useful for CircleCI’s adoption across the department,” Berti says. “It definitely allows the team to focus on writing code and developing new features, instead of having the team chasing the CI/CD platforms.”

The CircleCI Insights dashboard is “amazing for a quick look at the low-hanging fruit regarding project consumption and success rate,” Berti says. Engineers also use caching for mobile projects, and self-hosted containers for iOS builds.

Improved collaboration and communication, thanks to CircleCI’s built-in features for code review and testing, help teams work together more efficiently by detecting and fixing issues earlier in the development process. In addition, CircleCI’s automation of repetitive tasks such as building, testing, and deploying code lets engineers focus on writing code and developing new features.

CircleCI’s built-in testing and continuous integration features also help teams to catch and fix bugs early, reducing production issues and increasing the overall quality of the VanMoof software.

“CircleCI makes it easy for us to scale our continuous integration and delivery processes as projects grow, which allows us to handle larger projects and more users,” Berti says. “We gain a competitive advantage because our team can deploy software updates and features more quickly and frequently.”

Benefits of using CircleCI:

• Scaling CI/CD as the company grows
• Improving software quality
• Speed and quality accelerate competitive advantage

About VanMoof

VanMoof was founded in 2009 by Taco and Ties Carlier, two Dutch brothers who dreamt up the perfect city bike. Today, its sleek, multi-award winning e-bikes offer a high-tech and feature-rich experience for a global community of riders.