Web and Mobile App for Vehicles Parking Startup

Client Location

Johannesburg,
South Africa

Tech Stcak

Node.Js, Recat.Js,
Bull.Js, AWS Cloud

Team

3 Backend Developers
1 QA Enginner 1 Devops Engineer

We delivered an B2C Vehicle Booking app that allows its users to avoid lines for parking spots at their local shopping centers in South Africa.

Client
Challenges

They came to us with a two-year-old web app built in Node.js and React based on fifteen servers. The legacy code was written on naive logic, lacked proper system architecture, documentation, and had poorly established testing processes.

It required the refactoring of a great deal of legacy code and a needed a mobile version built from scratch.

Given the character of the app, handling hundreds of requests per minute, there was no room for errors—database rollbacks would be impossible in this case.

Key challenges in this project included:

Lack of proper documentation and poor app stability
Syncing data from thirty different servers with the main Web app and optimizing server performance
Handling real-time requests and processing them in a few timezones: Polish, US, and South African

Solution &
Result

Upon receiving access to various parts of the system and the codebase, we met for a three-day Discovery Workshop to work on the project scope, identify pain points, and challenge admyt’s business ideas.

To facilitate development and make sure every element of the app worked well, we wrote 2,000 unit tests and implemented Cypress.io to automate the testing, considerably reducing the amount of time spent on testing functionalities.

We also added Redis and BullJS on the backend. Thanks to this setup, we were able to simultaneously build new features and refactor legacy code in the existing parts of the app. During this stage, we were:

Developing the mobile version of the app with React Native
Integrating third-party platforms and connecting additional payment gateways
(PayU)

Discussing documentation, communicating on Slack, and having daily internal stand-ups

So far, it has recorded over 41,000 sign-ups and now links approximately 60,000 cars.
With a stable version built in Node.js and React, the app is now easy to maintain and augment with new features. It’s also much easier for new developers to jump quickly into the project.
Optimizing requests between servers resulted in a reduction of synchronization time from 20-30 seconds to just 30 milliseconds, making the app easy to scale. The team, however, is far from slowing down and is averaging around eight releases per month.