Platform Redesign

The purpose of this project was to upgrade an enterprise ecommerce web solution encompassing three company divisions with a more efficient & scalable solution. The origins for this project stem from years of rapid growth and the associated accumulation of technical debt as ATGStores.com grew from a startup and thrived through acquisition to become the west coast facing customer support center for Lowe's. The opportunity to focus on internal improvement opened during the first holiday season during ATGStores transition to Lowes, as the development department experienced an annual deployment freeze. The end goal of the project was to take the opportunity of a deployment freeze to redesign the architecture of the web platform and reduce the accumulation of technical debt through the introduction of software development patterns and practices.

This project was my first experience working with a collection of multiple cross-functional enterprise development teams on the same project. As the legacy platform and the development shop were written using earlier versions of the .Net framework, the collective design decision was made to migrate the existing code to the latest stable framework version using an N-Tier architecture. Legacy VB and ASP code was converted to C#, and patterns and practices for development were introduced and standardized across teams. Many challenges and obstacles were encountered by all of the teams, but were successfully overcome as the season and deployment freeze ended.

Performance in key site areas was greatly enhanced through the replacement of legacy code with modern frameworks. Maintainability was improved through the introduction and improvement of software development patterns and practices in order to reduce the accumulation of technical debt. Automated testing coverage was introduced or expanded upon as the focus of the company shifted toward continuous improvement & continuous delivery.