Siemens Healthineers China develops new image applications for online systems to help doctors with remote consulting for patients. Developers were using local workstations to develop and test for multiple platforms, but just setting up each platform could take days—time better spent on development and testing. Healthineers began piloting Microsoft Dev Box in 2023. It enabled them to prebuild multiple bespoke dev and test environments in the cloud, enabling developers worldwide to collaborate and complete projects faster.
From x-rays and CT scans to ultrasounds, mammograms, and more—Siemens Healthineers technology impacts more than 70 percent of medical decisions made daily, including diagnosis and treatment. The organization has teams throughout the world, each focused on issues that matter to their region. For example, in China, Healthineers are developing image applications for online systems that will help doctors perform remote consulting services, enabling them to meet rural patients virtually. There have been barriers to success, however.
“Our project is complex because it involves developing and testing for iOS, Android, and the web client across many platforms. And we have to maintain compliance with local regulatory requirements,” says Lex Hu, R&D Head of Digital Health, Siemens Healthineers China. “To do so, we have to work in complex developer environments.”
Each developer was responsible for building their own coding environment on a local workstation, which could take days or even weeks to complete. This process would have to be repeated each time the developer wanted to work on a different operating system or platform. It was a long, arduous process that delayed progress. Developing remotely on servers located across Europe added another layer of complexity and delays.
“We have fierce competition, especially here in China, so time to market is extremely important to us. But we also want to ensure we’re delivering the highest quality,” says Echo Qing Shan, Head of Digital Health China at Siemens Healthineers. “From the engineering side, scalability and replicability are top priorities, along with resilience. We need to ensure the whole process is done in a resilient way, so we can manage change without sacrificing speed.”
The team knew its existing development process was impeding progress. After careful evaluation, they determined multiple areas for improvement, beginning with the development environment itself. Developers were spending days setting up environments, time that would be better spent innovating. And they needed more powerful workstations to accommodate the Android operating system. Ideally, they wanted a preconfigured development environment to reduce training time for new workers. They found the solution to all this and more in Microsoft Dev Box.
Greater efficiency, less downtime
Microsoft Dev Box gives developers self-service access to cloud-based, ready-to-code solution workstations (“dev boxes”). Teams can configure dev boxes with tools, source code, and prebuilt binaries for a specific project, enabling developers to start work immediately. Dev boxes live in the cloud, meaning developers can switch between different configurations quickly without reconfiguring their machine. They also eliminate the threat of accidentally overwriting another build on the local machine. The Healthineers team recognized they would solve all of their core issues and more.
“We needed an effective, scalable, cost-effective way to switch between different environments. Dev Box gave us the solution,” Shan explains. “Global reach was also a consideration. We have global teams that collaborate on projects regularly, so we needed a solution that was accessible everywhere. Being in the cloud has given us the flexibility we needed from both a work and location perspective.”
A successful pilot
The Healthineers initiated a Dev Box pilot in late 2023. About a dozen engineers in Hu’s team are participating, including Wen Qi Tong, DevOps Engineer, Siemens Healthineers China. He has already noticed an appreciable difference.
“On the day I joined (Healthineers), I got a laptop and needed to install everything myself. It took two or three days. But with Dev Box, it’s already preset,” Tong says. “Setting up Dev Box only takes one hour, then everything I want is installed. Or, if I need to do some personalized configuration, I can. The experience has been better than local development.”
Although the organization doesn’t have formal results of the pilot, there have been noticeable changes. Notably, Hu estimates that Android development time has decreased by at least 20 percent. This is especially significant given that Android development requires a more powerful environment than other operating systems.
“Dev Box is already making a difference in our time to market, and that’s just the pilot,” Hu says. “We look forward to seeing what we can do when it becomes our standard.”
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“We needed an effective, scalable, cost-effective way to switch between different environments. Dev Box gave us the solution.”
Echo Qing Shan, Head of Digital Health China, Siemens Healthineers
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