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Case study

Three surfaces, one contract, fifteen months of not stopping

A web platform, a mobile application and a dedicated notification service, built as one system and kept in step through fifteen months of continuous delivery.

2 min read

Anyone can build three things. The difficult part is building three things that stay in step with each other for fifteen months while all three keep changing.

The claim is not "three surfaces"

A web platform, a mobile application and a dedicated notification service. Said like that it is a list, and a list invites the obvious arrangement: three teams, three backlogs, three release schedules, and a standing meeting to reconcile them.

Three surfaces landing on one contract, with releases as ticks beneath. The cadence is the claim — not the count.

We built them against one set of contracts instead, agreed before any of the three had a feature in it. That is a decision with an obvious cost — it is slower at the start, and it feels like ceremony while everybody is waiting to begin — and one payoff that arrives every week afterwards.

The release cadence never stopped to let the others catch up.

That sentence is the entire case study. When a mobile release does not have to wait on a backend release, and a notification change does not have to wait on either, nobody spends a Thursday finding out which of three versions of the truth is current.

Why the notification service is its own surface

It would have been less work to put notifications inside the backend. They were separated because they fail differently.

Before

Notifications inside the platform. A provider outage, a rate limit or a retry storm is a platform incident, and the thing that broke is the thing that has to keep working to tell anyone about it.

After

Notifications as their own service. It can fail, back off and recover without taking the system that generates the events down with it.
  • Web platform
  • Mobile app
  • Notification service

Fifteen months is the interesting number

Not because it is long, but because it is the period over which the decisions above were tested. A contract-first arrangement looks like overhead in week three and looks like the reason nothing is on fire in month nine.

Why this client is not named

We do not have permission to name it, so the sector identifies the entry instead. The shape of the work — three surfaces, one contract, a release cadence that held — is the part worth reading either way.

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