Refactoring to the rescue! Refactoring—the process of rewriting functional code, without adding new features, to improve performance, maintainability, and scalability—is the best solution to technical debt. Refactoring is an essential maintenance process to keep the software working well, and when an old system starts to bog down, it’s a sure sign that refactoring is long overdue. 

Metal Toad brought two crucial perspectives to BEA’s refactoring project. First, our ethos of excellence—every time we touch the code, we do our best to improve
it—drove our adherence to code best practices. Our engineering team brought BEA’s code up to snuff with the same attention to correctness, scalability, and
performance we apply to every codebase.

Second, we took a collaborative, user-centric approach to rapidly solve the software’s most critical issues to meet BEA’s pressing business deadline.

• The core team (product manager, architect, and engineers) worked shoulder-to-shoulder to review the software and identify issues within the code

• New Relic was used to get a detailed and objective view into the software’s performance, then identify pivotal areas for improvement
• Mapping user experience pain points (slow load and processing times) to code issues allowed the team to identify and prioritize the most impactful work
• The team took an Agile approach to identify the nine most crucial elements to fix, and to then rapidly build, test, deploy, and iterate—achieving huge performance gains within a single two-week sprint