IMS' Legacy Apps How re-engineering IMS’ legacy apps has future-proofed its business. We refactored this leading automotive data company’s outdated apps – reducing crash rates by up to 90%, creating a 99% success rate for front end user journeys and regaining IMS clients’ trust The Challenge Relying on legacy applications when they’re past their sell-by date is so damaging to a business. High crash rates, poor user experiences, outdated features and inconsistent functionality don’t lead to happy customers. That’s the ever-decreasing circle IMS found itself in. The company’s success relied on the accuracy of the vehicle journey data it provided to motor insurers via their customer apps. But temperamental tracking and spiralling failure rates were jeopardising key client relationships – and costing IMS its business. How could we recover its tech reliability without having to rewrite a whole new suite of apps? Indiespring Action Using our Springboard Development Framework, and following our mantra of transparency, agility and speed, we undertook a top to bottom code review of IMS’ three key customer apps. This revealed that one application had been built which had then been forked into three bespoke apps over time. And that meant that the three apps were achieving the same functionality in three different ways. So future modifications couldn’t be made easily, any issues couldn’t be fixed and tested in one go, more and more developer time was needed and an updating backlog formed around ongoing iOS and Android releases. We needed to despaghetti the separate code, to return to one single source of truth – the existing master codebase. This meant onboarding, reviewing, and stripping the architecture of the three different apps back into one central, pre-existing framework and integration. Then rebuilding from there. Refactoring legacy apps in this way can fix issues that grow over an app’s lifetime and prepare the code for future, easier development without the high cost of a full rebuild. As IMS apps’ crash rates began to reduce, development time was freed up more to help us focus on data misuse reporting and fixing device specific tracking errors. Getting vehicle journey data back on track? We were like the ultimate roadside tech emergency service. The Result We defibrillated IMS’s entire suite of legacy apps, restoring functionality, stability and accuracy through simple, impactful tech. 60-90% reduction in crash rates across the suite of mobile applications 99% success rate for front end user journeys Regained confidence with IMS partners to continue using the telematic policies with the mobile application Indiespring have delivered a seamless integration with our development team and their vigilance and work alongside their MAP program means we can focus on developing our products further without and our apps are performing and being easily maintained. Pete Finch - CTO
