07 — Audit & refactoring

Application modernisation

Free your applications from technical debt and regain your speed of innovation

Has your code become unstable and slow? We audit, clean and restructure your application foundation to reduce bugs and speed up your releases.

Move beyond firefighting

The technical debt that paralyses your development

Slower releases, repeated regressions or an environment that is hard to reproduce do not automatically justify a rewrite. An audit establishes the causes, their severity and the realistic options.

Adding the smallest feature takes weeks

The code is like a house of cards: touch one module and two others crash.

Recurring bugs that spoil your customers’ experience

Your teams spend more time firefighting than creating value.

Your developers are discouraged and threatening to leave

Nobody wants to work on an outdated code base that is hard to maintain.

What does cleaning up a code base involve?

Refactoring means restructuring and cleaning up the source code of an existing piece of software without changing its external behaviour for the user. It’s the equivalent of completely rebuilding a car’s engine and wiring while keeping the bodywork intact.

The elements analysed and fixed during the process

Cyclomatic complexity analysis & “Code Smells”

Identification of 1,000-line functions that have become unreadable and splitting them into small, reusable, isolated modules.

Implementation of automated tests (unit and E2E)

Creation of a software testing “safety net” (Cypress, Jest). If a change breaks an existing feature, the test alerts the developer immediately.

Fixing security vulnerabilities

Updating outdated dependencies (npm/pip packages) that contain security holes exploitable by hackers.

Database query optimisation

Table indexing, removal of N+1 queries and result caching to cut page response time by a factor of 10.

A transparent audit with clear priorities

We don’t rewrite everything just for the pleasure of coding. We provide you with a technical debt dashboard ranked by risk level (Critical, Important, Secondary) with an estimated ROI for each fix.

A deep clean-up without starting from scratch

Full security, performance and architecture audit

We pinpoint the bottlenecks, security flaws and risk areas in your code.

Targeted refactoring secured by tests

We restructure the critical parts of your application while keeping your service 100% available.

Clear documentation and code standardisation

We leave behind a clean, readable code base that complies with industry standards.

Our action plan to clean up your application

Automated analysis and manual code review

Prioritisation plan for technical work

Modular code rewrite (refactoring)

Setting up automated testing pipelines

Operational benefits

  • Development speed for new features tripled.
  • Drastic drop in the number of bugs reported in production.
  • Easy onboarding for all your future developers.

They trust us

“I recommend Play Digital because of their ability to understand the needs of the market in which clients operate and incorporate this dimension into their solutions. The support goes beyond purely technical thinking; it includes strategic considerations and elements of marketing and communication. Play Digital has allowed us to develop a custom solution in a complex market due to numerous regulations. The flexibility of the chosen solution allows us to constantly adapt to changing demands and market constraints.”
Laurent VianinDirector · Direct Care SA

Frequently asked questions

01Do we have to shut down our application while you clean up the code?

Absolutely not. We work in small increments, completely invisibly to your users. The application stays online 100% of the time during the refactoring phase.

02How can you find your way around code you didn't write?

That’s our job as engineers. We use static code analysis and security audit tools to quickly map the existing architecture and pinpoint fragile or poorly structured areas.

03How long does an initial technical audit take?

A full technical audit generally takes between 3 and 5 working days. We deliver a clear report identifying security vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks and a roadmap of the fixes to be made.

04How do you guarantee that cleaning up the code won't create new bugs?

Before touching a single line of complex code, we write a “safety net” in the form of automated tests. If a change alters existing behaviour, the test alerts us immediately.

05What is the concrete ROI of refactoring for my SME?

Your developers (or we ourselves) will be 2 to 3 times faster at adding new features, the number of outages drops drastically, and your server hosting costs are often reduced.

Make technical debt measurable

Decide what to fix, in which order and why

Show us the application, recent incidents and the changes that have become difficult to release.

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