RoloNext asked for a rewrite. The audit said no.

The situation

RoloNext is a SaaS application for creating and sharing business cards. Its founder came to us feeling helpless. That is not a technical description of a problem, but it is the accurate one, and it is how most of this work begins.

Her development house had stopped communicating. They worked in long waterfall blocks and showed her the product roughly every three months. Each showing opened a long back and forth to get the result where she wanted it, and by the time it got there, other features had broken. Three months to see anything, weeks to correct it, and a product that moved sideways.

By the time it reached us the conclusion had already been drawn, and it is the conclusion anyone draws at that point: this cannot be saved, rewrite all of it.

What we did

The first thing we did was help her get hold of her own source code.

Then we read it. The codebase was badly out of date, with most of the frameworks it depended on deprecated. And it had passed through a succession of developers inside that dev house, which you can see in the code itself, because ideologies leave fingerprints: different conventions, different structures, different assumptions about how the same problem ought to be solved. It had reached the point of two separate API structures living side by side, with the newer of the two abandoned partway through.

None of that is unusual in a system that has been handled by many people and owned by none. What matters is that reading it tells you which parts are actually beyond saving and which parts only look that way from the outside.

The finding

The audit split the system. The API and the UI did need rebuilding, and we said so. The mobile app did not. It needed a refactor, and a refactor is a fraction of the work, the time, and the cost of a rewrite.

Recommending the smaller job on part of a system is the least profitable thing a firm like ours can say in a first meeting. It was also the only honest reading of what was in front of us.

Why this page has no numbers

Every other study here ends in a delivered system and a figure. This one ends in a document. That is not a lesser outcome, it is the outcome the audit exists to produce: the facts in front of you before you commit the budget, including the times the facts cost us the bigger contract.