The problem
- Feature development had ground to a halt, and new releases were full of bugs that damaged user trust.
- Years of technical debt had produced environment discrepancies, inconsistent deployment workflows and critical security vulnerabilities.
- There was no formal development process and no cross-functional coordination, so expectations and priorities did not line up across teams.
What we found
- Dev, QA, UAT and production environments with different schemas, codebases and deployment histories.
- Hardcoded Square API credentials, outdated access controls, and VPNs and SSH keys that nobody had reviewed. Together they put payment data at risk.
- No single place for bugs, feature requests and internal work, and no link between branches and delivery stages.
- A front-end build on Webpack, out of line with current Laravel practice, and GitHub workflows that ran out of memory.
What we did
A technical assessment first
An in-depth evaluation identified the technical debt, the misaligned environments, the security vulnerabilities and the missing process, and proposed a corrective action for each.
Process and team structure
We introduced an agile delivery framework with a sprint cadence, reorganized the technical team around skills and accountability, and set up cross-department planning that brought Product, Engineering, Customer Success and Support together early.
One source of truth
Jira became the single intake for discovery, development and support. Branching strategies were mapped to Jira stages, so ownership is visible through Dev, QA and UAT.
Environments and build pipeline
We aligned all four environments, replaced Webpack with Vite, fixed the GitHub workflow memory issues, and introduced Git hygiene standards such as commit squashing and ticket tagging.
Tests
Cypress tests now validate the high-level integration points and reduce regression risk.
Security hardening
We removed the hardcoded Square credentials and rotated all tokens, hardened AWS and RDS access, revoked obsolete VPN and SSH access, standardized access and password rotation across Forge and DigitalOcean, removed lingering access through GitHub, Vercel and DNS, and enforced least privilege across the infrastructure.
The result
- The engineering function delivers features predictably and securely, in line with business priorities.
- Aligned environments and modern build tooling reduced deployment errors and eliminated environment drift.
- Rotated credentials and the removal of hardcoded keys reduced the exposure risk.
- A shared process and one project tool improved collaboration across departments.
“We cleared thousands of bugs, built testing environments, and charted development with full documentation.”