How SuperPlay Reduces Code Release Cycle Times by 80% with Foundational

SuperPlay Needed to Streamline Code Releases and Ensure Data Integrity and Quality Without Compromising Security

After launching in 2019, SuperPlay’s dedicated BI teams were managing data across multiple games to support millions of players worldwide. As SuperPlay expanded its portfolio with two more games in development, Omer Biber joined as Head of Business Intelligence to unify complex data management processes.

At SuperPlay, each game had its own team that included dedicated BI developers. The team’s data stack included GitHub as a code repository and version control platform, Google’s DataForm for data modeling and transformations, and Looker for business intelligence and reporting. While these tools supported extensive operations, they couldn’t track data lineage or validate code changes impact across systems — not in runtime and, in particular, not at build time.

All BI and warehouse code review was funneled through one central team lead, who manually reviewed analytics code across all projects. This setup provided deep game-specific insights but limited collaboration and scalability. As the BI team grew from three to nine developers, code reviews became a bottleneck, and maintaining data accuracy became increasingly challenging. Untracked code changes posed the risk of discrepancies that could surface months later, making it difficult for the team to identify their source or prevent similar issues in the future.

While Omer and his team had taken some steps to enhance data quality, they soon realized they would need a more efficient and consistent system to manage code changes and ensure data accuracy. “Even small code changes could cause downstream problems,” he says. “We wanted a process where team members could approve code and catch issues before they could escalate.”

However, after exploring solutions for data management and code approval, Omer found most tools required access to sensitive data. He needed a data management tool that prevented data lineage issues while meeting security requirements.

That’s when SuperPlay discovered Foundational.

“Before Foundational, code releases were manual, time-consuming, and prone to errors. It created a bottleneck that limited scalability because it depended too much on individual team members.”

Foundational Helps SuperPlay Scale With Streamlined Code Releases and Data Lineage Visibility

Foundational seamlessly integrates with SuperPlay’s DataForm and Looker code through GitHub, where Foundational’s native app automates pre-merge code validation and tracks lineage in real time. The data lineage is automatically extracted and visualized at build time before any code deploys — tracking how data flows through SuperPlay’s system and flagging potential data quality issues at build time.

For Omer, the security sets Foundational apart: unlike similar tools requiring access to sensitive user data, Foundational tracks code through GitHub without accessing SuperPlay’s internal database. This allowed Omer to implement and run the solution within hours.

SuperPlay now uses Foundational in three primary ways:

• Build-time pull request analysis: When any of SuperPlay’s BI developers submit a pull request, the platform automatically analyzes proposed code changes before merging them into the main branch. Foundational’s GitHub extension reduces dependency on a single pre-deployment reviewer, with developers receiving warning popups for errors and tips on improving coding.
• Shift-left data quality: Foundational flags potential bugs before they cause data incidents by continuously reviewing code and configurations for misalignments. These impact insights help the team evaluate how proposed changes affect downstream systems and validate each request. In turn, the team can confidently push new GitHub code, minimizing the time spent on ad-hoc code change reviews.
• Real-time automated lineage: Foundational’s data lineage feature visualizes data flow through lineage maps, ensuring accuracy from source tables to downstream reports. The BI team assesses the impact of code changes before deployment, and developers receive an automated Slack message to alert the team to prevent data inconsistencies or issues.

With Foundational, SuperPlay now has an efficient system to continuously monitor lineage tracking, with visibility at build time into how code changes impact downstream data.

“Foundational has given us the confidence to trust our processes, streamline approvals, and ensure data quality at every step.”