Each improvement can be compounded with every developer, and at some point the efficiency improvements outweigh the maintenance cost of the tools. Is the team large enough to benefit from a shared IntelliJ plugin?Įngineering velocity initiatives become more and more important as the size of the organization grows. If any of these ideas feel familiar, a plugin may be right for the team.Īndroid Rider and Driver line count (in millions) over time Does the team need an IntelliJ plugin?īefore building a plugin, it is important to evaluate whether or not the team needs one! The following questions would be worthwhile to ask:Īre operations performed repeatedly during development?Ĭommon operations may include generating test files with a specified internal format, implementing common architectural components, etc. This blog post should have everything required to get started with writing an enterprise-level plugin. If these goals resonate, continue on! Developing an enterprise-level IntelliJ plugin is easier than one might think.

Improve developer sentiment - Improve the mobile development experience at Lyft.

Encourage best practices - Generate templated code that conforms to the team’s best practices.

Improve developer efficiency - Provide tools to incrementally improve the developer experience.The IntelliJ platform offers a powerful SDK that enables developers to build plugins that enrich the IDE’s feature set, and a few years ago the team decided to take advantage of this SDK by building a plugin.

The Android engineering team at Lyft exclusively uses IntelliJ to develop new Android features (Android Studio is on the horizon, but that’s for another article). Building an Enterprise IntelliJ Plugin for Android Developers

Android studio plugin development