Case Study
Parking app company revved up performance and scalability with new software engineering framework from UST Xpanxion
THE CLIENT
This company provides a popular contactless parking app that helps millions of people locate, reserve and pay for parking on mobile devices every day in hundreds of cities, college campuses, concert venues, sporting events, and airports across the U.S.
THE CHALLENGE
App company wanted to improve development ecosystem
Since the app launched, this company has experienced an astronomical 50% year-over-year user-adoption growth. To keep pace with increasing demand and escalating transaction volume especially during peak seasons, the company wanted to improve the application’s scalability. The IT team also wanted to proactively identify and resolve performance issues in the app before functionality went into production—when problems were more manageable and less expensive to fix.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Company’s IT team deployed software engineering framework focused on continuous testing
To improve app performance and scalability, the UST Xpanxion team designed and developed a pure-Java, open-source software engineering framework following a “shift-left” and “shift-right” DevOps agile methodology. The “shift-left” approach used API layers, so the client’s DevOps team could quickly and easily integrate the app with other applications. Meanwhile, the shift-right strategy concentrated on continuous testing. After integrating the new software engineering framework with the client’s CI/CD DevOps pipelines, tests automatically run with every build and release, creating detailed feedback loops across the application lifecycle. The framework also included:
- A test data management system — to capture test data that adheres to stringent privacy protocols.
- A test functionality monitoring system — that audits CPU, memory usage, and queue health on a per-second basis, with baseline metrics of throughput, load balancing, response times, web and application server utilization and database activity.
THE IMPACT
Improved app development speed, quality, scalability and customer satisfaction
By addressing its app performance and scalability issues, the company increased development cycles, improved time to market, reduced costs and enhanced satisfaction for existing and new vehicle and venue customers. The automated testing in the new software engineering platform provided continuous, efficient processes to quickly identify performance bottlenecks, so issues can be resolved before they reach production. Also, the company’s development team implemented modern, agile DevOps methodologies, streamlined processes and improved release quality. The IT team also has the flexibility to add and upgrade critical load-heavy services, like GPS location.