Steadying a global student housing platform
Moving a team from firefighting to planned work on an unstable legacy platform
At a glance
A global student housing platform bought an unstable legacy rental platform with no tests or monitoring. I led an Equal Experts team in Australia and India. We met a fixed regulatory deadline without changing the legacy core. We also added the first monitoring and tests, so the team could move from firefighting to planned work.
The situation
The client runs a global student housing platform with 3 million residents in 25 countries. It had bought an unstable legacy rental platform. The platform had no automated tests and no monitoring, so any change to the legacy core was a risk.
US rental fee transparency rules had a fixed deadline, with regulatory penalties if it was missed. The team was spread across several countries and time zones. The work started as modernisation. When the client’s priorities changed, it moved to stability and team improvement.
What I did
- I delivered the US rental fee transparency changes quickly. We built new modules in isolation with a controlled switchover, so the legacy core did not change.
- I added the first monitoring to the platform, with Datadog and Sentry.
- I introduced automated tests, pull request reviews and code standards for the offshore developers in India and Pakistan.
- I led technical discovery and proposed a modernisation plan based on the strangler pattern.
The result
- The client avoided regulatory penalties.
- The team could see production errors for the first time, and had data to support modernisation.
- The team moved from firefighting to planned work.
- The client has a modernisation plan it can use for future work.
Stack
PHP Laravel for the legacy platform. TypeScript and NestJS for the new modules. Datadog and Sentry for monitoring.
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