Building a Culture of Testing and DevOps: How Indra Scaled Smart EV Charging Infrastructure
How Indra partnered with Build Circle to transform engineering practices and platform architecture, boosting test coverage from 9% to 70%, expanding deployment automation from 15% to 100%, and delivering critical API and data lake infrastructure.
"The changes Build Circle implemented have transformed our development process. We're not just writing better code; we're doing it together, more efficiently, and with a greater sense of ownership and pride."
Matt Noonan, Head of Cloud Engineering, Indra
Code coverage uplift driving product stability and fast feedback
Automated deployment surge across all platform microservices
Shared ownership achieved across cross-functional squads
Manual deployment friction in core release pathways
The Challenge
Rapid EV market expansion outpacing engineering process and platform stability
As an emerging leader in smart electric vehicle charging, Indra faced surging market demand and expanding software complexity. However, rapid commercial growth outpaced internal development processes, introducing structural friction across daily operations:
- Siloed teams and fragmented delivery: Development and operations worked in isolation, resulting in handoff friction, slow releases, and a lack of collective ownership over system reliability.
- Manual, high risk releases: Deployment was largely manual, with only 15% of services automated. Manual interventions repeatedly introduced human error, leading to unpredictable rollouts and avoidable downtime.
- Minimal testing visibility: Code coverage sat at just 9%, meaning regressions and bugs were often identified late in the cycle or directly in production. This eroded developer confidence and slowed down feature innovation.
- Growing architectural demands: Expanding hardware fleets required resilient, modern backend foundations, including reliable device management and unified data infrastructure to monitor charger operations in real time.
Indra needed to modernise its engineering culture, elevate code quality, and automate deployments without compromising uptime across an expanding network of live EV chargers.
The Solution
Embedding quality by design and architecting scalable cloud foundations
Build Circle collaborated with Indra to establish an automated DevOps culture, elevate testing practices, and build modern architectural platforms:
1. Robust automated testing and quality frameworks
- Comprehensive test coverage: Architected a modern automated testing harness that elevated code coverage from 9% to 70%, establishing rapid, dependable feedback loops for developers.
- Real-world validation environments: Built realistic end-to-end testing environments that simulate production conditions, ensuring new charger firmware and features are proven safe prior to release.
2. Complete CI/CD deployment automation
- 100% automated pipelines: Systematically eliminated manual deployment bottlenecks, increasing the proportion of automatically deployed services from 15% to 100%.
- Predictable, error-free delivery: Replaced high-stress release days with routine, automated deployments that minimise human error and eliminate operational downtime.
3. Core architectural modernisation with device management API and data lake
- Device management API: Architected and delivered a robust API platform to handle communication, configuration, and control across thousands of connected EV charge points.
- Scalable data lake infrastructure: Implemented a unified Data Lake architecture to ingest, centralise, and process high-volume telematics and energy usage data, unlocking richer operational analytics and proactive monitoring.
4. Cultural uplift and shared engineering ownership
- Cross-functional collaboration: Restructured team workflows around shared ownership of code, test automation, and release stability, breaking down historical silos between development and operations.
Business Outcomes
Greater platform resilience, faster release cycles, and sustainable scale
- Drastic reduction in production errors: Expanding test coverage to 70% ensured software regressions are caught and corrected early, protecting charger uptime and customer trust.
- Frictionless release velocity: Achieving 100% deployment automation enabled Indra to ship features, security patches, and firmware updates rapidly and repeatedly.
- Unified fleet management: The new Device Management API created a stable, extensible foundation to integrate and control expanding fleets of hardware without performance degradation.
- Data-driven intelligence: The centralized Data Lake unlocked powerful analytics and performance monitoring across the charging estate, providing actionable business and engineering insights.
- Self-sustaining culture: Indra’s in-house engineering team operates with shared accountability, high technical pride, and the modern delivery practices needed to sustain long term market leadership.
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