Talabat

Talabat is the Middle East’s largest food delivery platform. With 50+ Flutter engineers shipping features across a sizable monorepo, the team needed a reliable way to tame code sprawl, standardize practices, and keep performance tight without slowing delivery.

DCM became the team’s “tidying system” for Dart/Flutter code, helping engineers find and fix issues by category (bugs, performance, readability, maintainability, memory), automate cleanups, and enforce shared standards across squads.

Challenge

As Talabat’s Flutter codebase scaled, teams ran into common pain points:

• Cognitive load & inconsistency across modules and features.
• Legacy and unused code/assets are accumulating over time.
• Onboarding friction and harder cross-team collaboration due to uneven patterns.
• Risk of regressions when adding features quickly.

The team needed a pragmatic way to:

• See issues by category (not just by file/repo).
• Automate low-risk cleanups (unused code/files/deps).
• Standardize implementation details (state management, dependency rules, widget conventions).
• Measure progress over time (through dashboards and reports).

Solution

Talabat adopted DCM across the monorepo and developer IDEs/CI, using a KonMari-style approach: tidy by category (violation type) and finish with the small wins first.

"DCM is the right kind of strict. It helps us keep a large codebase tidy by category, automate the easy wins, and reinforce team standards—without slowing delivery."

— Cgongor Vogel, Staff Software Engineer, Talabat

The key DCM capabilities used in Talabat started with enforcing conventions (e.g., Provider/BLoC usage), memory-safe patterns (dispose, avoiding risky late), architectural hygiene, and automated cleanups such as dcm fix for unused code, unused files, unused assets, and dependency checks, and dcm check-dependencies to spot stale/unreferenced packages.

DCM also helped detect similar widgets and recommended consolidating them into a design system.

Impact

As a result of embracing DCM, Talabat engineering teams see faster cleanups through safe automation (unused code/files/assets/deps) and clear visibility as category trendiness shows progress and nudges the right priorities.

This helps them to see stronger consistency across modules and squads (shared rules, auto-fixes, design-system alignment) and better DX & onboarding with fewer surprises, clearer expectations, and smoother reviews.

DCM helped Talabat ensure quality & performance by catching patterns early that cause regressions and memory/performance issues, enabling faster shipping with fewer surprises.

"Engineers get actionable feedback during implementation, not after a PR or CI cycle. That alone saves time and prevents churn."

— Cgongor Vogel, Staff Software Engineer, Talabat