InnovMetric - Case Study

Advanced Installer is a vital tool in InnovMetric's chain of development. The key words that would express what Advanced Installer represents in technology of application packaging are reliability, scalability and versatility.

InnovMetric Software is the leading provider of universal 3D metrology software solutions. The world’s largest industrial manufacturing organizations (Toyota, GM, Volkswagen, Honda, BMW, Daimler, Ford, Rolls-Royce, Pratt & Whitney, Boeing, Embraer, Bombardier, Apple, and many more) trust InnovMetric’s PolyWorks® software solutions to maximize the benefits of 3D measurement technologies for their engineering and manufacturing applications.

Reliability

InnovMetric has applications which install in more than 10 languages, at sizes over 1.5 GB that contains more than 10.000 files and 400 folders. Providing high quality products for their users includes everything, from documentation and application features, to the installation package and updates deployment. Advanced Installer's agile development strategy ensures the team will never have problems with a bug (because it will get fixed in maximum one month, in the next release) stopping their release and sometime even helps the development team by including improvements very fast in the tool.

Scalability

A full testing cycle takes about 40 computing hours for InnovMetric, this includes fresh code checkout, building the applications and the installation packages, fresh VMs built on the fly, automatic upload of installation packages and a full range of tests. Advanced Installer's speed in building the packages and its file compression integrated support helps InnovMetric decrease considerably their package sizes and is an important factor in the testing cycle, making sure no time is wasted on routine operations.

Versatility

At InnovMetric, a significant amount of testing is done with automated tools developed over the years, based on the feedback received from their clients. This ensures streamlined testing of all new features, avoiding regression and human errors. To support their fully automated build and QA process, Advanced Installer provides a powerful command line interface, that allows the development team to build all the installation packages without any human intervention. In three cases, the command line interface did not provide enough flexibility so InnovMetric had to dig directly in XML sources. Advanced Installer is aware of these limitations and fully intends to fix them. Doing so, InnovMetric will not be dependent on a specific file format which is a bad development practice.