Our engineering team (~25 people) inherited a legacy codebase and repackaged it to run on a modern and scalable app platform. With no time to modernize the codebase before hitting showtime , and thus the unveiling and initial migration of customers from the old environment to the new can't be described as anything but a grandiose failure. We had major issues with quality and stability, mostly related to the actual codebase and us now encountering corner cases on a regular basis due to the scalability of AKS, but the problems also stemmed from us not having created the right conditions for those of our developers who were new to the codebase - which in all honesty was most of time. We had set ourselves up for failure by not providing guidance, training, nor reasonable processes around QA and release management.

Everything came to a grinding halt and we spent the next six months focusing solely on quality and stability.

It was six grueling months of bug fixing, infrastructure optimization, observability-reboot, and process management - but I'm proud to say that we made it, and boy did we learn some important lessons along the way!

This session is tech-agnostic as I won't dive deep into the technical side of things. Instead, I'll look at what we did to align our entire Engineering organization on a single focus for such an extended period of time, we'll see why it's all about the people and why early buy-in from informal leaders in the organization is key, and finally look at how you can find sustainability in long-running transformation processes and avoid burn-out of both the organization and your individual team players.