Building Sustainable Development Practices at Metso
Introduction
Metso is a global leader in sustainable technologies, providing comprehensive solutions and services for the aggregates, minerals processing, and metals refining industries across 50 countries. In the minerals processing, they support mining operations from plant design expertise to equipment, parts and services for every stage of the process, delivering innovative technology to advance the industry.
Telematics solution for gathering data from equipment for monitoring purposes (i.e. maintenance, analytics, etc.) had evolved in several phases throughout the years to meet new business and architectural requirements. As a result, the development team identified areas where accumulated technical debt was impacting velocity.
There was a discrepancy in effort being spent managing complexity rather than delivering new value. Recognizing this, Metso with Bytecraft initiated a focused effort to understand the underlying causes and strengthen long-term software sustainability.
Background of need / identified need to be solved
To better understand developer perspectives on complexity a survey was conducted across teams. Over 80% of respondents highlighted increased effort caused by managing complexity as a significant barrier to productivity.
This insight reinforced the need to establish shared practices and a stronger culture for managing and preventing technical debt.
The initiative followed a structured and data-driven approach to find solutions moving forward.
What Was Created
The outcome was an actionable framework of best practices for managing and reducing technical debt:
- Established new practices to prevent recurring issues
- Introduced new tools and a testing vision that emphasized long-term quality and automation.
- Improved onboarding processes, ensuring new developers adopt best practices from the start.
- Refactoring of architecture which resulted in cost savings and performance improvements to the solution
- Created a dedicated backlog for managing and prioritizing technical debt transparently.
- Embedded a culture of ownership through team-led initiatives and example-driven leadership.
As a result, teams reported measurable improvements in development efficiency and codebase maintainability.
“Development was made simpler and faster with the simplified code structure supported by commonly agreed practices. This made debugging easier and increased development speed for new features.”
Senior Developer, Metso
Results and Keys to Success
Several factors contributed to the success of the initiative:
