At this year’s Shopware Community Day, André Varelmann, Head of Solution Architecture at Strix, had the opportunity to host a Masterclass on one of the challenges many agencies and teams face when working on multiple projects over time: fragmented development setups. In this article, André shares the key takeaways from that session, and explains how we at Strix DE decided to unify our setups, and how we are benefitting from it.
The challenge
When different projects evolve independently, it’s almost inevitable that each develops its own setup. Onboarding new developers takes longer every time, maintenance is painful, and upgrades turn into risky tasks. This was exactly the situation we faced at Strix DE in the past. With multiple teams and projects running in parallel, the lack of a shared standard cost us both time and focus.
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Our approach
We decided to build a unified and optimized setup that every project can rely on. The guiding principles were:
- Consistency: one base setup across all projects, no matter the client.
- Maintainability: a setup that can be updated centrally and rolled out everywhere.
- Efficiency: reduced overhead for developers so they can focus on features, not infrastructure.
- Scalability: making onboarding and parallel project work smooth and predictable.
To achieve this we:
- Standardized local development environments (using Dockware).
- Implemented a mechanism for database dumps (using gdpr-dump)
- Introduced a dedicated container for code quality checks, ensuring the same tools and configs run locally and in CI/CD.
- Built a private package repository with shared plugins, Symfony bundles and utilities that speed up shop development.
- Made everything pre-installed and upgradeable so projects benefit automatically from improvements.
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Why it matters
Standards don’t restrict creativity, they enable it. By removing friction in setup and maintenance, we give developers the freedom to focus on what matters most: delivering value for clients and creating great commerce experiences.
Interested in the slides of the SCD masterclass? You can find them here.
Would you like to know more or discuss how a unified setup could benefit your team? Feel free to get in touch via andre.varelmann@strix.net or LinkedIn.