FiscalNote: Engineers for a Flagship Product Rewrite

About FiscalNote

FiscalNote builds software that helps organizations follow legislation, regulation, and policy. Government affairs and legal teams use it to see what government is doing and decide what to do about it.

The challenge: a rewrite already in motion

FiscalNote was sequentially rewriting large portions of its flagship product. The effort ran for months, with frequent releases to production, in a fast environment with a high bar for the code. Four to five teams of engineers were working on different features, sometimes on the same parts of the product. That takes technical skill and clear communication between teams.

At the same time the company was tightening its budget. It needed a firm that could supply engineers, including people who had already worked together, at a price that could flex with the work.

Who we staffed

The engagement ran from January 2021 through March 2022. It covered custom software development and staff augmentation.

We started with a self-sufficient team of full-stack engineers on Ruby on Rails, including an engineering manager. The team had worked with that manager before, so FiscalNote got a group that already knew how to work together. The engagement later expanded to PHP and WordPress development and to Python.

In all, five to six Maxiom software engineers worked on the main project and on additional work that was added as the year went on. FiscalNote continued the engagement past the first months and expanded it to other projects.

How the rewrite shipped

The deliverable was frequent releases to production, behind feature flags, in a DevOps-enabled codebase. About 20 to 25 other engineers were committing to that same codebase at the same time. The Maxiom engineers had to land changes without blocking the teams already in the repository.

They worked in the tools FiscalNote already used: Gmail, Slack, Jira, Miro, and Confluence. Project management followed FiscalNote's process, with suggestions when that process could be improved.

One later request was a niche combination, WordPress together with React.js. We placed an engineer for that skill set.

What FiscalNote reported

The VP of Engineering reported very good code quality, and a strong working relationship with QA, internal staff, and product management. Pace and turnaround on time-sensitive bugs stood out.

Engineers for a rewrite

Need more engineers on a product rewrite? We can add staff augmentation, a dedicated development team, or backend developers, and we can stay with the build and the releases.