Betterment

Betterment is a New York–based investment and savings platform focused on simplifying long-term financial growth for 1m+ customers. Its Flutter organization, comprising around a dozen engineers, builds customer-facing experiences alongside web and backend teams, where performance, reliability, and regulatory compliance are equally critical.

To maintain velocity in such a sensitive domain, Betterment utilizes DCM to automate consistency, accelerate developer feedback, and integrate code quality into every engineer’s daily workflow.

Challenge

Betterment’s Flutter team, although compact, roughly 12 engineers, ships production enterprise-grade financial software, where every release must strike a balance between speed and reliability.

As the codebase expanded, the team began to feel friction in what Casey called the developer loop: the cycle between coding, analysis, review, testing, and release.

That growing delay highlighted a deeper problem: feedback was arriving too late. Engineers often catch simple issues only in CI or during review, which slows iteration and introduces context-switching overhead.

The team also faced inconsistent analyzer configurations across repositories, each slightly different, and each developer occasionally muting warnings to stay unblocked. With a small team and multiple shared packages, manual enforcement of quality became unsustainable.

And in a regulated fintech environment, every build must be verifiably correct, making the need for a standardized, reliable static analysis approach even more urgent. The goal became clear: accelerate the developer loop without compromising reliability or maintainability.

Solution

The team adopted DCM as the foundation of their static analysis workflow, integrating it into both local development and CI/CD.

Beyond the default Dart lints, DCM added depth through custom analysis rules, metrics, and real-time IDE feedback. Developers could see violations as they coded, apply quick fixes instantly, and rely on DCM to detect readability, performance, and memory issues long before PR review.

To roll it out safely, the team used DCM’s baseline feature, which allowed enforcing new rules only on changed or newly written code. This approach helped Betterment modernize its linting strategy without overwhelming existing projects.

Impact

By bringing DCM into their daily workflow, Betterment cut feedback cycles from minutes to seconds. Issues that once appeared in CI logs now surface in the IDE, complete with automatic fixes.

Code reviews became cleaner and more focused on architecture rather than style, onboarding new engineers became easier thanks to shared standards, and the entire team gained confidence that every commit met a consistent baseline of quality.

The result is a developer experience that’s faster, safer, and more deliberate, precisely what a fintech product demands.

"We’re a small Flutter team, but lints help us move faster. DCM makes the loop shorter — from ten-minute CI waits to instant IDE feedback. It keeps our patterns consistent and lets reviews focus on what actually matters."

— Casey Rogers, Senior Software Engineer, Betterment