VI #012: Unlocking Developer Velocity: Refactoring Your SaaS Architecture for Faster Time-to-Market

Read time: 6 minutes

The ability for startup leaders and their product development teams to identify and seize opportunities quickly is increasingly the difference between success and failure.

Yet a poorly designed software architecture that is cumbersome for engineers to understand and work with can greatly impact agility. Refactoring your architecture can lead to increased productivity, faster feature delivery, and a more robust, maintainable codebase. The result is a smoother development process and quicker time-to-market for your product.

In this article, I’m going to explain how to unlock developer velocity and greater success for your SaaS company by refactoring your architecture for speed.

Building is harder, on a shaky foundation

Complex or poorly structured architectures often impede development velocity, as they create difficulties for developers to comprehend and modify the system. This results in extended time spent navigating and expanding the codebase. Other prevalent factors include:

• Insufficient modularity and separation of concerns, leading to increased fragility and time spent on testing and debugging
• Ineffectively managed dependencies and data flows, which can cause scaling and performance issues, unclear responsibilities, and hindered collaboration
• Subpar documentation and code quality, resulting in makeshift solutions and workarounds
• Absence of a refactoring strategy, causing technical debt accumulation and escalating complexity over time

Ideally, having skilled architects and adhering to best practices can prevent suboptimal architecture. However, this is not always feasible, as startups naturally iterate their system architecture while discovering customer needs. When faced with these issues, it's essential to reflect, review the architecture, evaluate the team's performance, and make necessary adjustments.

To tackle these challenges and enhance developer velocity, here is a proven step-by-step process that my teams and I have used successfully:

Step 1: Diagnose the root causes of complexity

Understanding the sources of complexity in your SaaS architecture is crucial for successful refactoring.

It can help to begin with a thorough code review to identify areas of technical debt, tightly coupled components, and convoluted logic. Analyze performance bottlenecks and evaluate your application's modularity and separation of concerns. Examine your application's data flows and dependencies to identify areas that can be streamlined or decoupled. Assess documentation and code quality, as poorly documented and hard-to-read code can indicate underlying architectural issues. Seek external input from experienced software architects or engineering teams for objective assessments and valuable insights.

After identifying the root causes of complexity, prioritize issues based on their impact on developer velocity and time-to-market.

Develop a detailed refactoring plan that outlines the necessary steps to address identified issues, with specific goals, timelines, and resource allocation for each task. Create and review the plan with the development team to ensure alignment with the objectives and to foster collaboration in addressing critical issues.

Step 2: Embrace modular design principles

Embracing modular design principles is essential for improving your software architecture and accelerating development.

It is commonly advised to break an application down into components based on functionality or domain, however, the implication of this is that when change is required to the architecture it is often painful and expensive. An approach that can help better optimize for development velocity is to decompose your application based on volatility, i.e. encapsulating frequent change into services or system building blocks.

Components should be implemented with loose coupling between them by using well-defined interfaces.

APIs and messaging systems such as REST APIs or message queues can facilitate loose coupling, plus approaches and patterns such as SOLID and Event-Driven Architecture. Select an architectural pattern that supports modularity, such as microservices or modular monoliths. Encapsulate each component's functionality and ensure it manages its own data, enabling teams to work independently on different components.

Manage dependencies effectively to reduce complexity and maintenance overhead.

Keep dependencies to a minimum, regularly update them to maintain compatibility and security, and use tools to track and manage them in a more automated way. Leverage reusable components where sensible to minimize maintenance, keeping in mind the Rule of Three.

Organize your code repositories to reflect the modular design, keep cognitive load low for developers, and implement comprehensive testing strategies for each module, keeping in mind the Testing Pyramid concept. Align your development teams around individual modules, fostering expertise and efficiency, and remembering Conway’s Law.

Step 3: Simplify data flows and dependencies

Complex data flows and tangled dependencies can significantly slow down development.

Streamlining these aspects of your SaaS architecture can help in reducing maintenance effort and accelerating time-to-market for enhancements, while also potentially improving scalability, reliability, and performance. Here are some steps to consider to simplify data flows and dependencies:

1. Map your data flows and dependencies: Audit your application's data flows and dependencies to identify areas for optimization.
2. Eliminate circular dependencies: Refactor components or introduce intermediary components to break dependency cycles.
3. Minimize data transfers: Reduce data transfers by combining or eliminating redundant data exchanges.
4. Decouple components: Refactor components that depend on multiple data sources unnecessarily. Abstractions such as facades or adapters may help to simplify interactions.
5. Standardize formats and protocols: Adopt standard, best practice data formats (e.g., JSON or Protocol Buffers) and communication protocols (e.g., HTTP or gRPC) where possible to streamline data flows.
6. Review data management: Review how data flows across components and is being managed throughout its lifecycle.
7. Patterns and communication: Review whether architectural patterns such as service-oriented and event-driven approaches and also messaging patterns are being used appropriately for your use cases.
8. Optimize database queries and schemas: Where appropriate, minimize the number of queries and data transfers required to complete a task. Techniques that may help include denormalizing data, using database views, or employing caching strategies to reduce data retrieval time and complexity.

Step 4: Implement continuous refactoring processes

Finally, it helps to establish a culture of continuous improvement and refactoring.

The development team should be encouraged to regularly review, assess, and refactor the codebase to maintain its quality and simplicity. Refactoring should be integrated into the regular development workflow, including capturing a backlog of technical debt and budgeting time to pay this down. Technical debt should be prioritized based on impact to development velocity, code quality, and overall architecture.

Automated tools such as static code analyzers and linters should be used, along with enforcing sensible coding standards (such as the popular Airbnb Javascript Style Guide). Application performance should also be monitored using APM tools, encouraging cross-functional collaboration to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Adopting continuous integration and deployment practices also helps to ensure rapid integration, testing, and deployment of module changes.

Finally, it helps to promote a culture of knowledge-sharing and learning, encouraging developers to share experiences and insights from refactoring efforts. It may also make sense to provide training and resources to help the team adopt best practices.

In summary

By following these steps, you'll be well on your way to unlocking greater developer velocity by refactoring your SaaS architecture for speed. The keys to success are:

1. Diagnosing root causes of complexity
2. Embracing modular design principles
3. Simplifying data flows and dependencies
4. Implementing continuous refactoring processes

Hope this helps. Have a great Sunday.

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:

1. Work with me 1:1 to build your team, product, platform, or career in tech.
2. Book a free discovery call with me to explore if your business needs would be a good fit for my advisory services. If we’re not a good fit, rest assured I’ll kindly let you know.