Context

Adform is the independent and open full stack ad-tech platform that encompasses creativity, data and trading, servicing media agencies, trading desks, brands and publishers globally. All of their solutions are modular, and easily inter-operate with all major technologies used throughout the digital advertising ecosystem.

Adform was founded in Denmark in 2002 and is among the world’s largest private and independent advertising technology companies. They have over 700 employees globally, with offices in 18 countries throughout Europe, North America and APAC.

Project goal

The main goal of the project was to create redesigned web pages under banners ecosystem that will have all the previous functionality as well as brand new user experience. Moreover there were few challenging requirements:

• Code readability must met all the general rules inside and outside of Adform

• Code structure must met all the general rules inside and outside of Adform

• Performance is a priority

• All the code must be covered with unit, integration and End-to-End tests

• All the possible and probable edge cases must be handled

Solution

There were 4 different web pages and 1 backend solution recreated during our cooperation with Adform. In addition to that a lot of mini user interface components were created. As all the projects demanded for high-quality solutions we devoted extra attention for technical and architectural decisions. All solutions are greatly designed from different angles:

• All the application runtimes are based on strong and widely used technologies

• Best programming practices were used at all times

• Systems architecture allows easy addition of new features

• Fully test covered code makes it very simple to maintain

Agile

To be able to keep project progress flexible we used Agile principles. We used Kanban methodology because it seemed to be the most productive method keeping in mind our and Adform’s cooperation. Adform was in need to provide it’s customers incremental improvements. Moreover, one of the most popular Kanban’s alternative – Scrum – was seen as too structured and time consuming for our mission at Adform. Kanban’s board let us efficiently organize the works at our side as well as Adform to see our progress and prioritize the tasks they needed the most.

Code Quality

Most of the time business needs outweigh technical needs. Adform’s case was different. Of course, the time to market was still a very important question, but what really comes to that market was even more important. Adform demanded for quality, a very high quality in every aspect – from user experience to every line of code. Because of this, every developed solution is following just best practices. No “hacks”, no technical debts, just pure code that performs very well, is easily scalable, is easily testable, is easily maintainable and is easy to understand for everyone. In addition to close-to-perfect code quality, all of it was additionally covered not only with unit but also with integration tests.

Fast Adaptation

Adform’s platform is huge. Active development with hundreds of developers since 2002 makes it any developer to have lots of knowledge to make an impact without unpurposely crashing the other end. toughlex team were working with 4 different projects which all of them had many integrations with other projects and so on. The team’s fast adaptation to the big part of the system was the key to our successful cooperation together with Adform. It let to make a difference instantly and make our client happy.