Bookreport: Modernizing Software Infrastructure with Micro Frontends

Challenge

Bookreport, a financial ERP for schools, is the back-office solution of choice for hundreds of K-12 schools across North America. It provides a broad range of key services including; accounting, board reporting, audit and budget preparation, payroll processing and HR services.

Co-founded in 2015 by Pinecone Partner, Nicholas Hughes, the product grew rapidly to successfully meet the needs of customers. However, given the business' priority for customer success, and a lack of engineering resources, the team lacked the bandwidth to make regular updates to the underlying dependencies of the software. The result; a burgeoning product with a healthy user base, but an ageing software infrastructure making it difficult to implement new features at speed.

To complicate matters, the Bookreport founding team knew that updating the dependencies would require months of effort that would touch and potentially disrupt almost every single service in a significant way. The time cost and risk cost of upgrading everything were massive to the business.

In short, Bookreport knew they could not continue to develop at a high speed without upgrading, but they also knew they could not afford to take off months from feature development just to upgrade the system.

Solution

Nicholas was able to provide Bookreport with much needed bandwidth by enlisting engineers and project managers from Pinecone Partners. The team were able to work independently of Bookreport's core engineering team, meaning that they would be free to continue actively working on the product during Pinecone's upgrade. We began our engagement with a short discovery phase in which we engaged closely with the Bookreport engineering team. Through this process we soon settled on what can be called a micro frontend strategy. Because Bookreport's software was essentially a large, monolithic React application, we realized we could break the service down into a federation of smaller applications, each separate from one another, but unified and directed by a piece of custom software; an application router.

The beauty of this approach was that these smaller applications could be developed in turn and run alongside the original monolithic application. This meant that Bookreport would be able to continue servicing their customers and actively developing new features for their application without any interruptions or service downtime.

With this solution in mind we began by creating the routing software. As uninterrupted service was critical to Bookreport and their customers, we first proved that we could write this software in whatever tech stack we wanted and have it control the monolithic app, all while maintaining the exact same user experience of the original application running on its own. Next, we took one single feature of the service and re-wrote it as a completely separate application using the brand new tech stack, again proving that this solution, from a user perspective, functioned no differently than the original monolithic application.

Once finished, it was a matter of thoroughly testing, measuring for performance impacts, and deploying. To Bookreport's surprise, we were able to implement this solution after just three weeks of work, which entailed all of the researching, prototyping, and final build process. Other than our early consultations, we didn’t require Bookreport's engineering team to deliver this either, as such they were able to keep feature development moving forward.

Result

Since Pinecone Partners overhauled their software infrastructure, Bookreport has reported massive improvements in their feature development times, with features being developed 3 times faster on average. Furthermore, our micro frontend solution has given them the flexibility to use the latest toolchains and develop cutting edge features, which their old infrastructure would not have supported.

Our approach has also meant that Bookreport are able to modernize their old code piece by piece, bringing their code over to the new application structure one function at a time. So pleased were Bookreport with the engagement and our micro frontend approach, that they took on one of our team full-time so that we could further assist them in bringing over all of their code to the new micro frontend structure.

By providing Bookreport with an on demand engineering team, Pinecone Partners were able to offer immediate relief to a technology team which was already under strain building out product features. Ultimately, our engagement with Bookreport allowed them to meet their key business objective of delivering success to their customers. By modernizing their key infrastructure, we were able to future proof their business and mitigate risk, allowing software development to continue and reach new velocities all with zero service downtime.