Architecture Assessment Identifies
Highest ROI Initiatives
Company
Summary
Company:
Develops web-based products
for financial advisors.
Solutions:
Financial advisor, mortgage,
provider, and enterprise
solutions.
Locations:
Europe
Challenges:

Unclear long-term architecture viability

No concrete plan for architecture improvements

Lack of metrics to measure architectural robustness

Developer inefficiency
Results:

Third party validation of
architecture viability
(presented to board)

Stack-ranked architecture
backlog with execution
plan

A set of design metrics to
monitor moving forward

2x+ increase in developer
efficiency with builds with
hardware upgrades and
component refactoring.
© Crosslake Technologies, LLC
The Company provides a Software As a Service (SaaS) solution to help the
financial services community thrive in an ever-changing market by making their
operations more professional and profitable. Built specifically for the European
market, The Company’s IT expertise, coupled with years of experience of the
European financial services sector, ensures that the system offers an
unparalleled degree of specialism for our clients.
Challenges & Opportunities
Results
Unclear long-term architectural
viability. The Company felt their
architecture was reasonable given the
current roadmap, but was unsure
about long-term
viability in terms of
enhancements,
performance,
scalability, and
maintainability.
Architecture validation. After
assessing the overall architecture,
Crosslake concluded that the
architecture was viable in the longterm. Additionally,
an improvement
was identified to
create a common
platform from two
related products.
No architecture
plan. The team
executed well on
new feature
delivery and made small incremental
improvements on overall design.
However, a holistic plan did not exist
with the resource dedication to pull off
the required technical advancements.
Architecture
backlog. A key
deliverable was a
stack-ranked
backlog of technical improvements,
along with an execution plan. The
backlog ranked the negatives of effort,
cost, impact, and risk against the
positives of perceived added business
and engineering value to quantitatively
define return on investment.
Lack of metrics. Architectural
improvements were mostly qualitative,
although the team did have good
metrics for performance and
scalability. Metrics on the source and
design level were ad-hoc and scarce.
Developer inefficiency. Developers
were performing multiple builds per
day in their development
environments, and had to employ risky
trickery to make their builds faster. An
analysis of the workflow, hardware,
and coupling was necessary to identify
key improvements.
(425) 941-2752
Design metrics. Metrics were
identified that lead to additional items
on the backlog, and provided an
indicator that could be run regularly as
part of the build process.
Increased developer efficiency.
Decoupling opportunities decreased
the build time on a developer
workstation from ~7:20min to
~2:00min. Hardware improvements
also dramatically improved those
numbers.
[email protected]
www.crosslaketech.com
Architecture Assessment Identifies
Highest ROI Initiatives
Crosslake’s technical assessment helped us understand where to focus our improvement efforts through a new pragmatic
understanding of ROI. We now have a comprehensive stack-ranked roadmap for change which has already streamlined our
development workflow and is helping us deliver better quality software, faster than ever before. A big thank you to
Crosslake for all their help, guidance and passion. — Stuart C., Chief Architect
How We Did It
Crosslake provided value in multiple ways:
Crosslake established the plan of attack for a 6-week
period with the CTO, and then worked collaboratively
with the Chief Architect and team of senior developers
to assess the architecture with a focus on impact and
risk of staying the course
compared with the effort
or a refactoring or reengineering effort for key
pieces of the system.
Through a set of daily
conversations, whiteboarding sessions,
interviews with key
developers, source code
analysis, and metrics
analysis, a full backlog
was established along
with descriptions of how
to fix the top items.

The project was executed
in an Agile way with daily
updates, weekly goals
and planning, and a
retrospective, over approximately 6 weeks. Sessions
were all done remotely, with Crosslake being US-based
and The Company being Europe-based.
The end result included a full architecture backlog, a
document describing the key issues with
recommendations for fixes, and a presentation to the
board of directors describing our findings.
An external review of a complex system by a third
party validated existing problems, decreased the
priority of others, and identified new issues and
recommendations that the team had not yet thought
of.
 Acted as an
influencing authority to
the board of directors.
 Provided an outsidethe-box set of
recommendations and
incremental execution
steps, including creating
a common platform..
 Kept the team
working to concrete goals
and measures.
Conclusion
Crosslake helped provide assurance that a complex
architecture was viable and established a plan for future
technical advancement and execution of re-engineering
efforts in an incremental way.
About Crosslake
Crosslake has a proven track record of delivering measurable results and quick return on investment to a diverse set
of technology clients. We offer a broad range of software development improvement services that can be tailored to
meet your organization’s needs. Find more case studies at http://www.crosslaketech.com.
© Crosslake Technologies, LLC
(425) 941-2752
[email protected]
www.crosslaketech.com