A customer-facing product in sixteen days

The problem

Customers on old versions of an enterprise platform wanted to upgrade, and nobody could tell them cheaply what it would take. Working that out meant an engineer going onsite through their installed estate by hand, which does not scale past a handful of customers and produces an answer only as good as whoever did the walk.

What I did

Built a product that does the assessment itself.

It scans the customer’s installed estate, classifies upgrade blockers against a versioned rules engine, computes a viable upgrade path from where they actually are, and produces a readiness report a board can read.

The rules engine is versioned on purpose. Upgrade blockers change as the platform ships, so a tool with its logic frozen at release date starts giving wrong answers within a quarter. Versioning the rules means the assessment can be corrected without shipping a new binary to every customer.

I wrote the architecture decisions into the repository as I went, so the reasoning survives me. It ships as a signed public release.

What changed

Empty repository to signed release in sixteen days, alone. An assessment that used to require an engineer onsite is now something a customer can run themselves.