Cutting down technical debt for a fintech unicorn

“Initially, it seemed like an endless cycle of addressing local issues and encountering new bugs. Our target was to maintain only 10 to 15 bugs in the pipeline. In the first month, we reduced it from 50 to 20, thanks to their expertise.”

– Gregg Kang

Former CTO at Carta

About Carta

Founded in San Francisco, Carta is a global company that provides an ownership and equity management platform for companies, investors, and employees. Carta's platform revolutionized how companies manage equity by providing an online solution that simplifies and fully automates processes. By providing a centralized hub for equity management, they empower companies to make informed decisions, enhance transparency, and streamline operations. With its innovative approach, user-friendly interface, and focus on accessibility, companies of all sizes can electronically handle their cap tables, issue stock options, and handle equity transactions.

Challenge

By the end of 2015, Carta (then known as eShares) had completed its Series B funding round, raising $17 million and bringing its valuation to $77 million. While the company grew, Carta aimed to expand its platform and serve small and mid-size businesses outside the US. They were faced, however, with capacity constraints. There was too much to accomplish on the business side, and hiring more developers would divert the focus from strategy to onboarding and training new team developers. Quickly, Carta realized they needed an external partner to seamlessly integrate with their team and unblock them to refine and expand offerings. This was how they bumped into Vinta.

Carta had a small development team then, and the need to implement features rapidly inadvertently led to a surge in platform bugs.

To address the need for technical talent, they contacted Vinta and began crafting a plan to reduce technical debt, allowing us to improve the platform.

Approach

Carta had three primary objectives: accelerate new feature development, reduce technical debt by addressing bugs and implementing comprehensive testing, and introduce industry best practices through external evaluation of their existing code and tools.

During the project, Vinta embraced the role of a technical collaborator. We interacted daily with the Carta team through our staff augmentation service, integrating with their management platforms, communication channels, and development processes. This seamless integration allowed us to maximize efficiency and maintain optimal project momentum.

Optimizing technical debt management

Our primary focus was not only to fix existing issues but also to improve their test suite by implementing regression tests. This approach ensured we were also preventing problems from resurfacing in the future.

With a focused team of developers, we diligently addressed and resolved many front-end and back-end bugs. We also migrated old Django patterns, making them up to date. We applied the best practices for Django's latest version, which had not yet been enforced in the code. Furthermore, this upgrade allowed us to optimize queries using new techniques that had just been introduced to Django. 

Our team conducted thorough code reviews on GitHub to ensure code quality and adherence to best practices. This meticulous review process upheld our commitment to excellence and high standards.

Outcome

Within the first month of our engagement, Vinta made significant progress, reducing the number of open bugs by 60%. Throughout the one-year partnership, our dedicated team diligently worked to keep the total number of bugs as low as possible. We promptly addressed and resolved issues of varying complexity – ranging from HTML/CSS/JS to Python/Django.

Vinta played a pivotal role in enhancing the platform's stability, reliability, and overall quality by leveraging our extensive technical expertise and embracing a collaborative approach to improve Carta's test suite. Our unwavering dedication to delivering exceptional results exemplified our commitment to supporting Carta's success during a crucial growth period, reinforcing our position as trusted partners in their technical journey.

What does the client think of Vinta?

“I enjoyed working with Flavio and other engineers through his consulting firm, Vinta. Flavio and his team worked directly with our QA team at eShares to fix many of our bugs promptly and effectively. Although we hired Flavio and his team to fix issues, I am confident that he will successfully work on larger projects and deliver new features.”
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– Gregg Kang, Former CTO at Carta

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"I worked with Flavio and his team for about six months on a project at eShares (where I work in QA), and I cannot recommend him and his talented team at Vinta enough! Not only were they quick at identifying the problems in our software and coming up with effective solutions, but they were an energetic, highly motivated group of software engineers who were fun and positive to work with. We had to communicate daily as they worked remotely from Brazil, but their response time was always quick, and their communication was thorough. It made my job a lot easier to hand an issue over to them, knowing it would be handled promptly. They simply don't miss deadlines. Flavio and his team have certainly set the bar high for any contractors that we partner with in the future. I highly recommend Flavio and his team at Vinta Software to anyone needing software design/development/optimization. Great experience!"

– Kristina Nguyen, Former QA Lead and Carta's #7 employee

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