How to deal with technical debt and SOS situations in a digital product

SAN FRANCISCO - May 26, 2021 - PRLog -- Sometimes, customers come to Evrone for rescue because their product works poorly or not at all, mistakes have been made in the software architecture, or business performance is suffering. When this happens, we have to do serious work on refactoring, legacy reworking, and technical debt analysis.

Management for the project "Let's Eat at Home!" contacted us because their website had begun to crash under the current loads. In the future, this could lead to an outflow of regular users, so it required an urgent solution.

We decided to redo the entire backend of the project, because even quick-fix solutions would only add another six months to a year to the project's functional lifespan. To speed up loading and improve reliability, we reworked the caching scheme, worked on the Rails code optimization, and improved image loading. We also added protection against malicious attacks.

The choice between outsourcing and hiring your own team can be very important for a digital project. It is very easy to make a mistake at the start, which, in the future, costs a substantial amount of money to fix and can even threaten the existence of the business.

For example, in 2020, when the retail and restaurant industries were forced to go online, companies that were already actively developing their digital channels and investing in infrastructure and technical debt management did the best.

When looking at the causes of technical debt, another example of a mistake that we often see is focusing only on releasing new features. This is a classic example of accumulating technical debt while developing, for example, a portal.

Since business owners often do not have an understanding of the technical nuances, the likelihood of making mistakes in development management is increased. For example, a very small part of the budget and time is spent on updating libraries and tools and introducing new technologies. As a result, the product turns into a solution that consists of patches and "crutches" on the backend. This can affect, not only reliability, but also the turnover of technical staff. Hardly any developer wants to tidy up an unbalanced product architecture.

https://evrone.com/edim-doma
https://evrone.com/ruby

Used technologies:
Ruby, Foodtech, Backend, Media