Civitatis is a leading online distribution company for guided tours, excursions and activities in Spanish, with more than 80,000 activities in 3,600 destinations spread over 150 countries. In 2022, more than 600,000 people enjoyed one of Civitatis tours to make their trip even more memorable and fulfilling.
Maintaining quality, ensuring scalability and keeping up with a fast-paced business are common challenges faced by digital product companies, like Civitatis. Their technology platform had successfully supported their business for many years, but as the application and business needs grew in complexity and size, their monolithic architecture was falling behind. With the growing range of activities and destinations offered to customers, Civitatis needed to address scalability, maintenance and testing while improving their ways of working, so they decided to partner with Thoughtworks.
Thoughtworks analyzed Civitatis' platform and identified the best ways to modernize their architecture while enabling Civitatis’ own technology and empowering engineering teams. We proposed a new approach that involved implementing modern engineering practices such as Test-Driven Development (TDD), Pair Programming, and Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD).
The solution also involved an organizational change; autonomous, co-sourced delivery teams were defined and aligned with their business domains, initiating the process of decomposing the monolith into microservices, and an event-based architecture using Domain-Driven Design (DDD).
Our quality and engineering processes were good but not enough to allow us to scale the team as fast as we wanted. We felt it was the time for a development culture shift and modernize the architecture; in order to achieve those goals, we needed the support of an experienced team to help us in the transition.
A holistic Engineering Effectiveness approach
In less than four months, the first co-sourced team delivered its first MVP in production, receiving great feedback from users and clients and improving the overall software quality and ability to scale. Significant platform improvements have resulted in a 32% reduction in page load time, creating a smoother and improved customer experience. Changes and new features can be deployed in minutes, instead of many hours, increasing speed to market and the overall confidence as the automated tests cover more than 90% of the application.
The improvements extended organization-wide, with other teams adopting new agile practices, optimizing business processes and building quality-in at every stage of the software development lifecycle. With the new engineering practices and technology stack in place, Civitatis is now well-equipped to handle the complexities of its business and offer travelers around the world an unforgettable experience.
The success of this partnership showcases how leveraging cutting-edge engineering practices and technology stacks can enable businesses to overcome technological hurdles. Civitatis is a prime example of how addressing these challenges can foster rapid growth, being the company’s teams’ dedication essential for the best implementation. All this ensures long-term success for companies in a rapidly changing digital landscape
