Zuehlke

Zühlke delivers mission-critical software across healthcare, industrial engineering, and enterprise sectors. Their Flutter teams build highly complex multi-platform apps, often involving NFC, BLE, USB, and cloud-connected workflows.

To keep these systems maintainable as teams and codebases grew, Zühlke relied on DCM to enforce structure, prevent regressions, and maintain architectural clarity across their projects.

"I cannot imagine keeping our codebase consistent and maintainable without DCM. With a complex project and a team of six developers, the rules and structure DCM enforces are essential."

— Nicholas, Team Lead, Zühlke

Challenge

Zühlke’s flagship Flutter project scaled to 10-14 active developers, creating a fast-moving and increasingly complex codebase. Without guardrails, developers struggled to maintain consistent imports, file structure, naming, and architectural boundaries across layers such as domain, application, infrastructure, and UI.

"We were a big team — up to 14 developers. Very complex codebase. We needed clear structure and rules. Otherwise PR reviews were repetitive and time-consuming."

— Djordje, Lead Software Architect and People Lead, Zühlke

The team also needed a way to prevent cross-layer leaks, avoid regressions as new developers joined, manage technical debt over time, and provide clients visibility into quality trends, particularly important in regulated domains like healthcare.

Solution

After evaluating several options, Zühlke adopted DCM for its speed, depth, and architectural features. They introduced DCM using a baseline-first strategy, enabling strict rules without breaking the existing codebase.

The team reviewed new rules in weekly developer exchanges to ensure shared understanding and buy-in.

Rule selection was collaborative: the team reviewed new rules in weekly developer exchanges to ensure shared understanding and buy-in.

"It’s important the team agrees — otherwise developers will ignore or baseline them."

— Djordje, Lead Software Architect and People Lead, Zühlke

Zühlke now uses a wide set of DCM capabilities, including architectural import rules, unused code checks, translation checks, CI integration, and custom domain-specific constraints such as enforcing CachedNetworkImage, banning Alignment.left/right, and requiring clock.now(). Metrics like lines of code, nesting depth, and complexity also guide component design and maintainability.

Memory-leak detection proved especially valuable in complex reactive flows.

"Memory leak detection helps a lot. I might not notice every time — DCM warns me immediately."

— Djordje, Lead Software Architect and People Lead, Zühlke

Impact

DCM became the foundation of Zühlke’s architectural discipline, keeping the project clean, predictable, and aligned.

Engineers spend less cognitive effort on repeat comments, PR reviews move faster, and the team has fewer runtime issues thanks to strict structural and leak-prevention rules. The new DCM Dashboard also provides clients clear visibility into technical debt and quality over time.

"Clients never see technical debt — this solves that problem."

— Nicholas, Team Lead, Zühlke

DCM also improved onboarding, helping new developers adopt the right patterns from day one. Reflecting on the project, the team emphasized one key learning:

"Integrate DCM from the start, before writing a single line of code. It saves enormous effort later."

— Nicholas, Team Lead, Zühlke