Cocoliche
Assessment of a Rails second-hand clothes marketplace
1 — About Cocoliche
Cocoliche is a quality second-hand clothes shop. They have several physical shops in La Plata and Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as an online marketplace.
Brenda and Constanza, founders of the brand, approached us with an exciting opportunity to improve their back-office operations. They were looking to increase performance and introduce new features, including Inventory Control and Barcode Scanner Integration.
2 — Discovery
When Cocoliche reached us, their staff was frustrated by some back-office pages due to slow response times. It was necessary to assess the application before introducing new features, so we agreed to review the code and conduct a performance and tech debt analysis. The goal was to estimate how much effort it would require to modernize the application and then introduce the new features.
"Their efficiency, kindness, and punctuality were impressive. They delivered excellent solutions."
Constanza Darderes | Founder
3 — In-depth analysis
To perform the assessment, we needed to have access to the application, the code, and the APM (Application Performance Monitoring system) to be able to make meaningful recommendations. In this first meeting, we learned that:
- This application was 9 years old.
- The infrastructure management was inconsistent.
- The application had some issues when it was first developed: unmet deadlines and rushed code, which resulted in poor implementation or broken features.
- The application had a good deal of technical debt.
- They weren't unsing an APM.
With access to the staging application and the code, we started working on the Actionable Insights Report.
4 — Actionable insights report
After a week of performing the assessment, we were able to deliver an Actionable Insights Report, including our findings and recommendations on performance issues, tech debt, and infrastructure improvements like:
- Slow-loading pages that either took too long to display or timed out.
- We suggested uniformizing and simplifying the infrastructure management using a PaaS provider. We analyzed different options and laid out a minimal plan to port the application to one of these.
- We recommended a high-level plan with several steps to upgrade Ruby and Ruby on Rails to the latest versions.
- We analyzed the performance of the app and proposed solutions and debugging strategies for the most critical and most used features of the application.
- We detected several issues that could be solved using a proper caching strategy or needed database query optimizations.
This report allowed us to lay out a roadmap, and adjust it to Cocoliche's IT budget. Soon after we started collaborating with them helping them with application modernization and developing new features. You can read more about our subsequent work with Cocoliche here.
