Fintech
Manage Equity Electronically.
The challenge
Carta is a San Francisco based online platform that allows companies, from seed stage to pre-IPO, to manage equity electronically. By the end of 2015, the company raised $17 million in a series B funding to reach a $77 million valuation to go after small and mid-size businesses outside of the US. At that time, Carta's development team was small and needed to move very fast on feature implementation. That focus on speed led to a surge in the number of bugs on the platform, raising needs for more technical talents. Since hiring and training new developers takes a while, Carta looked for external developers to help their team to fix bugs, without affecting development speed.
“We had a big bug issue at first. We would fix stuff locally and new bugs would come. It was an escalating issue. Our goal was to have only 10 to 15 bugs in the pipeline. The first month, we got it down to 50, then down to 20.”
Scaling their team
During the period of the project, Vinta's duty was to work together with their team in a Team Augmentation fashion and solve as many bugs as possible, while introducing regression tests to prevent those issues from coming back. Team Augmentation is ideal for companies who want to:
- Speed up implementation of new features in critical times;
- Build spinoff products to test on the market;
- Reduce technical debt by fixing bugs and writing tests;
- Introduce good practices by bringing an external evaluation to the current code and tools used.
- Fix and Improve development processes to achieve more productivity and more quality.
Team Augmentation projects usually work on a very close relationship with the client, be it in-loco or with constant online communication. Vinta team integrated swiftly with Carta development process. Slack was our tool of choice for the proximity we needed. We managed workflow through Jira, integrating and adapting smoothly to their ongoing operation. Code review was done via GitHub.
After the first month of engagement, Vinta was able to help reduce the open bugs from dozens to a few. The partnership lasted for one year, during which Vinta worked to keep the total number of bugs as low as possible, solving bugs from simple to complex, from HTML/CSS/JS to Python/Django.