66% Less Code, Zero to 99% Test Coverage in 5 Weeks:
How a Regulatory Compliance Platform Got Rebuilt
Services Rendered: Production Legacy System Engineering ● Production AI Platform Modernization
A regulatory compliance software provider operates a SaaS platform that tracks regulatory obligations across eleven international frameworks for a large global customer base. The operating environment is certified to SOC2 Type I and II and ISO 27001.
The Assessment
Tangled Dependencies ● Code Bloat ● Audit Exposure ● Imminent Deadlines
The company’s head of digital had inherited a platform that was no longer keeping pace. The original architecture had accumulated years of technical debt and could not absorb new requirements at the speed the business needed. He brought in Tecknoworks to assess the entire digital products portfolio: three core applications across seven workstreams covering Architecture, Code Quality, Infrastructure and DevOps, Security, UI/UX, Data, and Product. The workstream leads spent weeks inside the codebase.
The assessment mapped the full landscape of accumulated technical debt, the natural result of five years of incremental development under shifting requirements. The platform had significant gaps across architecture, quality, and security. Test coverage was zero or near-zero across all three applications, against an industry standard of 80 percent. Issue density ran multiple times above industry standards. There was excessive code duplication where the standard is below 5 percent. Multiple database engines were being used for similar data, entities were duplicated across applications, and multitenancy was implemented differently in each one.
Tecknoworks delivered a comprehensive assessment report with clear recommendations: consolidate to a modern architecture with shared services, unify storage and UI frameworks, integrate automated quality gates, deploy security monitoring for Zero Trust Architecture, and implement proper branching strategy with Blue-Green and Canary deployments. The roadmap was sound. But the client did not get a chance to follow it in order.
The Challenge
Proving Under Fire
Before the client could act on the assessment recommendations, urgent delivery needs arose. Tough deadlines were approaching and the existing delivery capacity could not meet them. The client asked the Tecknoworks team, who now understood the platform intimately from the assessment, to help deliver.
The team scaled to approximately 14 people to fight fires across the platform. During this delivery work, the Tecknoworks engineers experienced the architectural debt firsthand. Not as assessors looking from the outside, but as engineers living it daily: the duplicated entities, the fragmented repositories, the brittle pipelines, the absent tests. Every deployment was painful. Every change rippled unpredictably. This phase earned the client’s trust and deepened the team’s understanding of what actually needed to change at the root.
The Solution
Double or Nothing
Having lived inside the platform and earned the client’s trust through urgent delivery, Tecknoworks proposed something radical. Rather than incrementally patching the platform while continuing to fight fires, they would rebuild its foundation. The pitch was simple and carried real conviction: “If you’re not happy with what we do in five weeks, you pay nothing.”
The client agreed. A three-person team was assigned to the modernization sprint.
In five weeks, that team delivered a complete platform transformation. The 14 separate repositories were merged into two clean monorepos with clear boundaries between frontend and backend concerns. The backend was reduced from 205,000 lines to 69,000 lines, a 66 percent reduction, while simultaneously expanding its capabilities. Rather than patching the existing UI, the team wrote 77,000 lines of modern frontend code from scratch.
The 89 legacy pipeline files were replaced with six automated pipelines. The team wrote Bicep Infrastructure as Code templates that deploy the entire Azure environment, eight services in total, with a single command: App Service, Static Web App, SQL Server, Cosmos DB, Blob Storage, a PDF generation engine, monitoring infrastructure, and identity management.
Eleven regulatory calculators were rebuilt, tested, and validated against the platform’s core compliance frameworks. The team built 156 API operations covering every workflow in the platform, each with automated test coverage. The modernized platform included features the legacy system never had: an AI-powered optimization engine, projection tools for forward-looking compliance planning, real-time notifications for regulatory threshold alerts, and automated data entry workflows.
The contrast was stark. Fourteen people had been fighting fires across a fragmented platform. Three people solved the root cause.
The Outcome
Trust & Partnership
The numbers tell the story clearly. Test coverage went from near-zero to 99 percent, with 1,448 automated tests covering all 156 API operations. Third-party dependencies dropped from 164 to 46, a 72 percent reduction in supply chain risk.
Deployment time went from hours of manual intervention to minutes with a single command. The codebase became two-thirds smaller and more capable.
Beyond the metrics, the modernized platform launched ahead of multiple competitors, protecting a significant multi-year revenue opportunity for the client.
Results At a Glance:
What's Possible Now
Before and after
Before this engagement, the platform was the bottleneck. Every deployment took hours, every change rippled unpredictably, and 14 people could not keep three fragmented applications stable. After it, the platform is the foundation. A single command deploys the full environment in minutes, 1,448 automated tests guard every workflow, and a three-person team ships confidently across eleven regulatory frameworks.
After the five-week sprint, the client expanded the Tecknoworks team from three engineers to eight and moved toward making Tecknoworks their permanent engineering partner. The client retains the product function, defining what gets built and why. Tecknoworks owns the engineering execution, deciding how it gets built and making sure it works reliably in production. The next phase is scoped around production hardening, expanding end-to-end test coverage, and planning the full cutover from the legacy platform.
Why This Engagement Matters
A story about progression
This is not a story about engineering velocity, though the velocity was exceptional. It is a story about a progression that cannot be faked: assessor, firefighter, architect, partner.
The assessment gave Tecknoworks diagnostic credibility. The delivery under fire gave them operational trust. The “double or nothing” sprint gave them proof of conviction. Offering to work for free if the client was not satisfied is not a sales tactic. It is what a team does when they have seen the root cause, know they can fix it, and are willing to bet on themselves.
The most telling detail is the contrast between the two phases. Fourteen people fighting fires could not keep the platform stable. Three people solving the root cause rebuilt it entirely. That is not a story about headcount. It is a story about understanding the real problem versus treating symptoms.
Technology:
.NET ● GraphQL ● Azure ● Bicep Infrastructure as Code ● CI/CD Pipelines ● PDF Generation Engine ● Real-time Notifications ● AI-powered Optimization Engine
AI Delivery Squad
An embedded senior engineering team that modernizes legacy platforms and stays to run them in production, the way a five-week rebuild here became a standing partnership.
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