Case Study

ASOS: Enhanced business agility through Software Modernisation

Codurance worked alongside the ASOS team to train and coach them as they modernised and enhanced the speed of change, and rate of delivery.

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Asos

Challenge

Modernising systems to keep up with increasing customer demand

 

Asos is a leading online fashion and cosmetic retailer. The e-commerce sells over 850 brands as well as its own range of clothing and accessories and ships to all 196 countries from fulfilment centres in the UK, USA and Europe. 

 

Due to growing popularity, ASOS was using legacy, on-premise systems that could not meet its increasing customer demand. In addition, the legacy systems could not guarantee performance during peak shopping periods such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

 

Its core systems needed modernising to improve their IT capabilities, including updating their existing technology stack and adopting modern software development practices and techniques.

Project

Re-architecting core systems

 

We helped ASOS by rapidly building and re-architecting some of their core systems, adding in levels of redundancy and caching that allowed them to cope with peak traffic. We also built fall-over contingency libraries to implement cross-region disaster recovery and implemented cross-region high availability clusters. In conjunction with the development of replacement services, all of the existing architecture was migrated to the cloud and was restructured to better align with the functional areas of the business. Safer deployment was now made possible due to the changes.

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Training

Training

We implemented a large-scale software craftsmanship coaching program across their 40+ development teams. We introduced or reinforced key skills around Extreme Programming (XP), TDD, SOLID principles, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and encouraged a DevOps culture.

Read more The aim of the craftsmanship program was to teach the individuals how to implement these techniques into their own teams and improve coding standards across the department. The senior engineers filtered the knowledge down by implementing these new skills into their teams. By instilling a culture of learning excellent technology skills developed within the organisation.
Software Modernisation

Software Engineering

All of the existing architecture was migrated to the cloud and was restructured to better align with the functional areas of the business.

Outcome

Agile Software Development

 

ASOS has made significant steps along the road to agile software development. They have adopted a host of new techniques rapidly. By addressing their technology limitations, iterations are now more organised and ceremonies are delivering more value. We improved the technical practices and techniques across the teams within ASOS. This enables their teams to release higher-quality software to production more frequently and safely. ASOS continues to thrive and improve and we are proud of the help we provided. We believe that ASOS’s attitude and desire for growth and change aligned well with Codurance’s expertise, coaching, and support, resulting in many enriching experiences for ASOS’s staff.

Enhanced the knowledge, techniques, and skill base across their 40+ development teams

Instilled a DevOps culture within the organisation

Increase the frequency and safety of software releases into production