see live project
Country
USA
Domain
Real Estate
Timeline
5 years

NYC Real Estate Agency

Our customer is an American real estate agency in New York City. Since the 1990s, they have provided an exclusive subscription-based solution to more than 1.3k B2B clients and 2k real estate brokers. Their web portal has an average daily visit of 15-20k (the peak value was 35k users).

Due to significant growth, they needed to speed up the development and take their software to the next level. We handled software development, human resources, and team management processes.

task set
  • Set up an Agile Scrum for both in-house and dedicated team
  • Boost the performance of engineering teams
  • Re-architect the app
  • Implement code refactoring
  • Solve technical debt accumulated by previous vendors
  • Improve the overall code quality Fix the product’s security issues
  • Implement new functionality
  • Improve the system with advanced technologies and approaches
team
Tech
2 Front-end Developers
6 Back-end Developers
3 QA engineers
2 Mobile Developers
1 UX/UI Designer
Management
1 Project Manager
1 Product Owner
technology
.NET Core (C#)
Angular 7
React
Node.js
MS SQL Server Less
WebForms
WCF
NHibernate
Telerik
Elastic Search, AWS
Docker
Kubernetes
AWS Lambda

Our Part

Legacy modernization 
Legacy modernization 

The whole system was hard to manage and almost impossible to support. It contained over a million lines of code — for example, a single login page had 13k lines.

Our team handled the code-cleaning process by rebuilding the core functionality of old features. We implemented code refactoring and changed the duplicated code with the programming patterns. This allowed us to reduce development and testing time due to the usage of the existing and tested solutions.

We also changed the approach for solution-building and used ready-made software aligned with industry standards (Entity Framework Core). As a result, we reduced the overall amount of code to roughly 140k lines and achieved better system performance. We empowered the product with advanced solutions that are more secure, efficient, and easier to support.

Project migration 
Project migration 

The mix of outdated technologies slowed the system and caused significant security issues. We migrated the portal to modern React, the latest .NET version, and implemented new features and UX. We also changed the app’s architecture. This allowed us to improve performance, reduce hosting costs, and make the system responsive, fast, mobile, and user-friendly.

DATA SECURITY
DATA SECURITY

We found and fixed the product’s security issues and managed the technical debt.

QA
QA

After the code refactoring, we covered the system with unit tests and Dependency Injections (the code was not unit-testable before). It led to 80–100% unit test coverage for the main product and subprojects.

Project Documentation
Project Documentation

We developed all supporting technical documentation, including user and development guides, use cases, and unit test examples. We also prepared detailed and descriptive pages based on business rules, main user stories, and possible outcomes of different behaviors in Confluence.

We also prepared code guidelines for the in-house development team to maintain and support the solution.

HR Management
HR Management

With the help of our extensive network of recruiting agencies and strong market reputation, we assembled a dedicated team in 42 days (compared the average of 52 days for hiring a senior-level team of this size). This allowed us to avoid delays in the development process and start working on the customer`s project in the shortest possible time.

Scrum project management
Scrum project management

We established strong management and administration processes by setting up the Agile Scrum processes. As a result, our team was more cost-efficient while maintaining a high level of productivity.

Achievements

A new open-source B2C online platform
  • Amazon Web Services as a cloud solution
  • Optimization of the database requests
  • Replaced Win-Forms with the latest MVC Angular framework
  • Reduced the costs of third-party services such as PayPal, NY API, and Google Maps by developing and integrating our own solutions
  • Development and integration of modern tech solutions
  • Speeded up the website’s response time from 35 seconds to less than 1 second
  • The portal’s compliance with the latest security standards

As a result of our partnership, our customer received a renewed, secure, modern system with better performance and UX. The customer’s product has become number one in the New York area. 

results

Since 1990, our customers have worked with remote, dedicated tech teams worldwide, including ones from China, Vietnam, India, etc. Over the years, previous vendors developed the customer’s web portal using numerous different approaches and technologies. Our team cleaned up legacy code and migrated the project from old technologies to modern ones. We also implemented new features, solved security issues, and set up convenient and transparent management processes.

After the code refactoring and re-architecture, the infrastructure cost was reduced by X%. The new architecture allowed an app to serve 5x more clients with the same infrastructure cost. Due to better UX, the client base increased by X%, and the customer return rate increased from X% to X% per year.