Prior to being acquired by Versapay, DadeSystems was an early pioneer in large-scale, AI-based payment processing. Due to customer demand, Dade developed a mobile application alongside its renowned desktop platform, allowing delivery drivers and sales people to overcome the hassles of paper check processing with speed and ease.

While the app was well-received and fueled new growth, the Dade team struggled to overcome a critical obstacle: ever-changing iOS requirements and competing priorities were outpacing their ability to keep the app performing at a high level.

The Problem: How to Keep Mobile Moving Forward

While leadership had envisioned keeping development talent in-house, industry-standard struggles with developer turnover and talent retention pushed development of their mobile app further behind the standard of service their customers had come to expect.

The overall app experience began to feel stale and outdated. Error-prone updates and a lack of automated testing only further magnified the pitfalls of releasing manually.

With most of their development talent specializing in Ruby on Rails, investing in a top-notch mobile customer experience meant enlisting world-class React Native developers.

Enter Foxbox.

Our Solution: Automate to Stay Ahead

“It started as a rescue operation,” recalls DadeSystems VP of Engineering Doug Hathaway.

Engaged to lead Versapay’s mobile engineering effort, progress was strong and steady.

Foxbox absolutely chewed up our backlog. They worked like surgeons.
Doug Hathaway, VP of Engineering, Versapay

Leveraging Foxbox Digital’s deep React Native experience, not only was tech debt quickly paid down and their library updated, but fixes to the mobile app’s foundation meant that future maintenance could be done proactively, ensuring that evolutions in operating systems wouldn’t cause Versapay to fall behind again.

Our implementation of a new CI/CD pipeline transformed how we brought the Versapay, Cash Application to market. It’s fast, reliable, and automated with the push of a button.

Through the integration of Sauce Labs, Semaphore CI, and our own development magic, we delivered Versapay the value of automated mobile end-to-end testing without burning substantial additional resources and time.

Every time we build a feature, every pull request, every commit is automatically tested on real devices to make sure it’s working as expected.
Katharine Padilla, Sr. Mobile Engineer, Foxbox

Outcomes: An Irreplaceable Partnership

Having initially resisted the idea of enlisting outside development help, our close partnership with Versapay has transformed how they serve their customers. 

Prior to engaging Foxbox, they released updates to the mobile app every two months. Now they’re released every two weeks. The release process itself, previously a 3-5 hour manual process, is also now down to just 30 minutes, adding valuable predictability to daily operations.

Their new carefully documented build process, automated testing system, and ability to adapt quickly now means a new custom build request from a client no longer travels along the hazardous road of human error it once did.

Reduced errors have dramatically improved customer satisfaction, to the tune of a 99.32% success rate. And perhaps most importantly, stability has never been stronger. Versapay’s automated test suite means releases are pushed with full confidence that existing functionality will be unaffected.

When I’m working with Versapay, I don’t feel like a contractor. It feels like I’m part of their team.
Anastasiia Kraineva, Senior Agile Delivery Consultant, Foxbox 

A relationship built on proactive maintenance means always looking ahead. Which is why, as Versapay’s mobile engineering partner, we’re also migrating the entire code base to TypeScript.

So whoever is at the helm of the mobile app in the future, the code is safer, cleaner, and easier to read than ever before.

Refactoring to a statically-typed safe language during both development and testing means reliability is constantly improving and errors are kept to a minimum.

Through the acquisition of DadeSystems by Versapay, our partnership continues to be one built  on trust, predictability, and the peace of mind of knowing a critical piece of your business is always in good hands.

They’ve required zero hand holding from day one. It feels like a true partnership.
Doug Hathaway, VP of Engineering, Versapay

Tech Stack

• Mobile: React Native, TypeScript, JavaScript
• DevOps: Semaphore CI, Fastlane
• QA: Webdriver.io, Appium, Saucelabs, JavaScript

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