This meant an incredible 10x increase in the campaigns they were running for users which calculated to a 100x jump in technology impact as far as the number of API calls.

It was obvious that Adwerx engineering, a team of about 20, had done a stellar job of building the solution to reach this impressive milestone of capabilities and growth. Engineering leadership had the foresight to understand the next phase of work and growth would not only require revisiting the stability of their architecture, but also the culture of the engineering team itself.

The Adwerx engineering team values fostering a healthy, supportive, and collaborative team, rooted in continuous learning of best practices. Because of those values, Josh Bielick, CTO, and Reed Emmons, VP Engineering, questioned whether they could be doing better, and worried that a period of extreme high-growth and the pressures for speed of delivery at scale could threaten practices around quality.

What emerged early on in the engagement was the realization that the best return on investment that thoughtbot could offer was to focus on pain points in the ecosystem around the product - the people, processes, tools, and documentation.

thoughtbot and the Adwerx engineers practiced pair programming, an agile development technique in which two programmers work together on a single screen, and ran code reviews together. thoughtbot also led lunch and learns for the team, reviewed pull requests, and emphasized a focus on test-driven design and documentation for testing.

thoughtbot and Adwerx worked on lowering the barrier to running tests. The team had an existing test suite of 6,000 tests but no one felt comfortable updating the code and the tests had become very difficult to work with. This made it hard (and intimidating) to write new tests.

More importantly, the team became aligned around the engineering leadership’s vision and the best practices needed to work towards that vision - including methods for respectful and productive communication when working through complex challenges.

They also bootstrapped a completely new, fast, low-barrier test suite which has led to a higher standard for code quality. The discomfort of using the old test suite has been replaced with confidence throughout the team to write and use tests that elevate the quality of the product.

Across all levels of the Adwerx developers, from Junior to Senior, the feedback has been consistent - thoughtbot helped them become better developers.

In 2018, Adwerx was named one of Inc. Magazine's best places to work. thoughtbot and Adwerx continue to collaborate on the ever-growing Adwerx platform.