A large financial services client originally used Adobe Flash for its core platform. When Adobe announced it was sunsetting Flash, our client hired another company to create a new platform. Unfortunately, the other company built a profoundly flawed system that didn’t follow any modern best practices or design patterns.

One of the most egregious design flaws was the use of the front-end as part of the transaction flow. This led to a wide range of critical errors, many unhappy customers, and even lost client accounts. Plan A was hired to re-architect flawed sections of the platform while still keeping it operational in production.

Our engineers identified all the components that needed to be modified based on the transaction flow. We created automation tests to ensure no functionality would be lost post-conversion. We then designed a new transaction engine using event sourcing, circuit breaker design patterns, and much more. Plus, of course, we removed the front-end from the transactional workflow.

This extremely challenging task generated deeply satisfying outcomes, including:

• Clear states of the transaction.
• Scalable and robust execution.
• Dramatic improvements in uptime and errors -- we stopped emergencies related to the transactional engine.
• Avoided a second expensive rebuild.
• Made the solution compliant with new regulatory requirements.
• Stopped the bleed of clients.
• Enabled much faster uploads and downloads of key media.
• Launched new functionality.