Industrial property consultancy.
Since 2023 AraLith, a software house in the province of Rome, active since 2007, has been developing the application's frontend: brought in to support the team taking it to production, a few months later we were entrusted with its full development.
Case study
For an industrial property consultancy, AraLith took over development of the portal its clients use to follow their own matters. It is a software house case study on a project already under way: we stepped into code written by others, close to the production release, and for almost three years we have been looking after its evolution. AraLith is a software house in the province of Rome, active since 2007.
Year the collaboration began
Of continuity on the same project
Technical point of contact, from analysis to delivery
The client
Studio Torta is one of Italy's long-established industrial property consultancies, and one of the few in Europe in its sector to have obtained ISO/IEC 27001 certification. The portal we are talking about is the application the firm's clients use to follow their own matters: patents, trademarks, designs and other rights, together with deadlines, communications and documents.
In 2023 the platform was being developed by an external agency and had to reach production. The firm looked for additional capacity to see the release through and called on AraLith to work alongside that team.
2023
We step into a codebase already written by others and racing towards production. The first job is not writing: it is reading, understanding the existing conventions and starting to deliver without slowing down the people already there.
After a few months
The firm decides to entrust AraLith with full management of development. From then on our responsibility also covers priorities, estimates and the direct relationship with the people in the firm who use the portal.
From release to today
Separate repositories for frontend and backend, development, test and production branches, releases through pipelines. Changes come in gradually, and whatever looks improvable is documented and discussed, not changed on our own initiative.
2026
The firm asked us for proposals to evolve the interface: alternative directions to decide on by seeing them, rather than imagining them.
Development spread across several suppliers, a release deadline to meet and a codebase to understand from the outside. Our task was to add capacity without adding friction.
A single point of contact for the portal's development, almost three years of continuity on the same platform, and a knowledge of the domain that lets us discuss choices with the firm instead of simply carrying them out.
Joining a project already in production without slowing it down is possible, provided you do not write new code at full pace in the first period: you read the existing code, adopt the conventions already in use and deliver small, verifiable changes. On this project we came in while the platform was heading towards release, working alongside the team that was developing it.
The client decides the development priorities. Our job is to make that decision an informed one: estimates, the technical consequences of each choice and the alternatives, before the choice is made. On this project, since the move to full management, the proposed priorities come from us and the approval from the firm.
The code written before stays and is evolved: rewriting everything is almost always the most expensive and riskiest choice. Whatever looks improvable is noted and discussed with the client, and we work on it when that piece of code is the subject of a task, not in passing.
We work with clients that have formal security requirements by following the processes the organisation has set itself: separate environments for development, test and production, tracked releases, no production data used for testing, no secrets in the documentation. Studio Torta has obtained ISO/IEC 27001 certification and our work fits into its procedures.
Stepping into a project written by others is what we did for Studio Torta. The first technical call is free and helps us understand what state the code is in and what is worth doing.
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