CTO For Hire was engaged to perform an independent 3^rd party review of a custom web application. An external agency had developed the custom workflow tool incrementally over several years for an established trades business.

The review focused on three priority areas:

• Solution Quality: The business was concerned about the quality of the app, rising from several bugs and inflated estimates over time. Review addressed software patterns, framework and package/dependency usage, testing & general technical debt.
• Re-platforming Risk/Opportunity: The business wanted to understand the risk and challenges of building on top of the solution and to balance the cost/risk/opportunity of re-platforming from scratch.
• New Business Model: The business wanted to ‘spin out’ the workflow tool as a niched SaaS product for their industry. While they had commercial validation of the opportunity, they needed confidence that their solution could be adapted in this way.

The analysis and subsequent report highlighted several low-risk areas for improvement and was accepted in full by the client.

In response to this review, and limitations in the current agency’s availability, the business engaged a new development provider and committed to a more full-time team to invest in the growth of the soon to be SaaS solution.