DEPT & Sonar: Driving innovation and excellence in the business services industry

DEPT® is a global technology and marketing company that designs, builds, and runs digital products and experiences for the world’s most impactful brands. As an AI-native partner, they combine engineering excellence with creativity to deliver work that is fast, flexible, and future-ready.

Behind every campaign, product, and platform is a foundation of high-quality, efficient, and secure code. Shipping great work doesn’t start on launch day; it starts in the development environment. That’s why DEPT® continually invests in tools, systems, and partnerships that help their engineering teams uphold the highest standards across markets, disciplines, and time zones.

A cornerstone of this commitment is SonarQube: the independent verification layer that
ensures every line of code they ship is reliable, consistent, and trusted. SonarQube
strengthens their AI-supported engineering workflows, helping teams catch issues earlier,
automate quality checks, and ship better products, faster.

The challenge: Disparate quality standards

DEPT® is committed to delivering digital products built on a foundation of high-quality, secure code. However, managing engineering standards across a rapidly scaling, global organization presented significant governance challenges. Initially, individual teams relied on decentralized SonarQube instances. While flexible, this approach resulted in fragmented quality reporting and inconsistent code quality standards across the organization. This structure amplified friction in several key areas:

• Inconsistent governance: Decentralized configurations made it difficult for leadership
  to ensure uniform adherence to quality and security policies.
• Verification bottleneck: The rapid adoption of AI-assisted coding introduced an explosion of new code volume, threatening to worsen manual code review bottlenecks and increasing the risk of introducing unreliable code into production.
• Developer toil: Developers spent unnecessary time on maintenance, fixing issues late in the development cycle, and correcting inconsistencies caused by disparate coding practices.

The Solution: Centralized verification and quality as a culture

To transform their code quality landscape, DEPT® pursued a strategic shift toward a single, authoritative source of code intelligence and standards. They recognized that simply increasing code generation speed required robust, automated governance to ensure that speed translated to quality outcomes.

DEPT® implemented a centralized SonarQube Cloud environment, establishing a universal verification layer across all teams and projects. This approach instantly ensured that every developer received immediate, consistent, and actionable feedback directly within their workflow, drastically improving efficiency.

This move empowered the organization to successfully implement the "vibe, then verify" philosophy. Developers have the freedom to "vibe"—to use AI coding tools to accelerate initial code generation and explore ideas quickly. They are supported by a culture of accountability to "verify," where all code, whether developer-written or AI-generated, is instantly scanned against a single set of standardized processes to ensure code quality, code security, and maintainability before it enters the codebase.

The Results: Higher quality code with lower risk

By standardizing on SonarQube, DEPT® achieved immediate, measurable improvements across the entire software development lifecycle. The platform provided the specialized assurance needed to navigate the explosive growth of AI code volume safely. The key outcomes for DEPT® included:

• Increased code consistency and quality: Standardized analysis ensured a reliable and maintainable codebase. This resulted in a greater positive impact on overall code quality and code maintainability.
• Reduced risk and security vulnerabilities: Automated checks and AI-driven fixes prevented security
  issues from reaching production, demonstrating a positive impact on both vulnerability rates and defect
  rates.
• Optimized productivity: Developers spend more time on innovation and less on rework now that issues
  are identified 60% faster and troubleshoot time is decreased by at least 30%.

By embedding automated, integrated code quality and code security directly into the development workflow,
DEPT® built a foundation of trust for its global teams, ensuring that the speed of modern AI coding does not
come at the cost of long-term maintainability and security.