No CI/CD, No Scaling: How to Transition from MVP to V1.0 Through a Tech Audit

The ability to scale and adapt to the market demand is crucial for any modern tech business. Your product can be promising, innovative, and functional, and capture the interest of potential clients and investors. However, the lack of a robust development process can let you down as demand and user base grow. 

Without a CI/CD pipeline, the team will struggle with manual deployments, leading to bugs in production, slowing down development velocity, and making deployments error-prone and inconsistent.  As the project scales and the codebase expands, the absence of automated testing, integration checks, and reliable release processes will become the direct path to technical debt, user-facing issues, and loss of customer trust. 

A completely missing CI/CD pipeline, lack of proper documentation, and some other development flaws were what we found during a tech audit for one of our clients. Luckily, the project was still at the MVP stage, so the client addressed Axon just in time before things could get worse!

Who Was the Client?

Our client is the creator of an exclusive and original solution for the fans of digital art and NFTs – the digital canvas-like frame that can cast high-quality works of digital art, NFTs with provenance, and any image or video content from a mobile device with the installed app. 

At the time of contact with the Axon experts, the project was at an MVP stage, on the lookout for a new development team to design their product architecture and develop a cross-platform Flutter app. Planning to scale and meet the increasing customer demand, the company needed a comprehensive evaluation of its existing technical infrastructure. The client viewed tech audit services as a way to gain insights into their current processes, identify areas for improvement, and develop a high-quality full-scale commercial product. Meanwhile, our goal was not merely to fix current issues but to establish a framework for sustainable business growth in the future.

What Was the Challenge?

Early-stage apps like our client’s, by their nature, tend to suffer from unreliable hardware integration, inconsistent core features behavior, and limited support for diverse media formats. Typical MVP weaknesses also include poor error handling (e.g., content may fail to load or cast) and the lack of seamless onboarding, which can frustrate non-technical users. At the same time, the product’s success greatly relied on delivering a smooth experience – fast, polished, and reliable. Thus, the client’s main concern was delivering a solution that would satisfy their target audience, who appreciate aesthetics and utility.

In addition, the client had experienced setbacks due to their previous team's lack of adherence to best practices. They needed a partner who could help with scaling, relying on proper CI/CD practices, and ensuring that new features would be deployed quickly and reliably. Also, this had to be a team able to foster a culture of consistent documentation and knowledge sharing – one of Axon’s strongest skills.

What We Found

Having conducted the tech audit, we revealed several critical issues that caused development inefficiencies and hindered the product's stability and scalability. 

No CI/CD Setup

One of the most glaring issues was the absence of a CI/CD lifecycle. Deployments were executed manually, creating prerequisites for subsequent errors and delays. The lack of automation slowed down the release of new features and increased the risk of introducing bugs into the production environment. 

Essential Documentation Missing

Another critical finding was the lack of key artifacts, such as Cloud Topology Diagram, Component Diagram, Physical Data Model, and Deployment Guides: these were either incomplete or nonexistent. This created a knowledge gap that hindered the team's ability to understand the system architecture and deployment processes.

Documentation serves as a vital resource for both current and future team members. It provides clarity on system components, their interactions, and the overall architecture, facilitating smoother onboarding and collaboration. Without these documents, new developers faced steep learning curves, leading to inefficiencies and increased time-to-productivity.

Which Risks Did This Introduce?

The shortcomings identified during the tech audit introduced several risks that could jeopardize the product's success. Each of these risks had the potential to derail the company's growth trajectory, making it imperative to address them promptly.

Higher Error Risk with Manual Deployments 

Manual deployments are inherently risky. They are prone to human error, leading to inconsistent environments, missed steps, or even production outages, especially as complexity grows. They also slow down the release cycle, creating bottlenecks and reducing the team’s ability to respond quickly to bugs or user feedback. Over time, this fragility undermines developer confidence and makes scaling the product much riskier.

Moreover, the time spent on manual deployments gets detracted from valuable development resources that could have been focused on building new features or improving the existing ones. Thus, the risks of manual deployments posed a critical concern that needed to be mitigated through the implementation of automated processes.

Onboarding and Scaling Challenges

The absence of documentation posed challenges for onboarding new developers and hindered the project’s ability to scale effectively. As the app grew, the lack of clear wireframes and developer resources meant that new team members would struggle to understand the system architecture and workflows.

Also, onboarding time is a crucial metric for any organization. A lengthy onboarding process can lead to frustration for new employees and delays in project timelines. By investing in comprehensive documentation, the client could streamline this process, enabling new developers to become productive members of the team more quickly.

Risk to Production Stability

Without a proper mechanism to track infrastructure changes, the risk to production stability was significant. Changes made to the system could go undocumented, leading to confusion and potential conflicts down the line. This lack of visibility into the infrastructure made it challenging to diagnose issues and implement necessary fixes. Having a clear record of infrastructure changes allows teams to understand the impact of modifications and ensures that any issues can be traced back to their source.

Our Recommendations

Based on the findings of the tech audit, we put forth a series of recommendations to address the identified gaps and mitigate the associated risks. First and foremost, these recommendations aimed to establish a robust development process that would enable the client to scale effectively and efficiently.

Implement CI/CD using AWS CodePipeline and CodeDeploy

The first recommendation was to implement a CI/CD pipeline using AWS CodePipeline and CodeDeploy. These tools facilitate automated testing and deployment, allowing for faster and more reliable releases. 

The implementation of a CI/CD software lifecycle had to bring forward numerous improvements to the development process and increase the product quality:

Frequent Updates Without Friction

On the way from MVP to the operational growth stage, the software app evolves quickly with new features, improved content rendering, support for more content formats, bug fixes, and so on. CI/CD process flow ensures automated test runs, builds, and verification for every code change and consistent application deployments to different environments. This lets you avoid regressions and enables the team to ship updates weekly or even daily, keep up the app stability, and gather real user feedback rapidly.

Smoother Hardware Integration

When mobile apps control hardware (like the client’s frame display), this introduces a tight feedback loop between the mobile app logic, casting protocols (e.g., BLE, Wi-Fi, WebSocket, or custom APIs), and rendering behavior on the frame. The CI/CD pipeline helps introduce automation for integration tests between the mobile app and the frame app, builds that target different device profiles and OS versions, and staged rollouts to catch hardware-specific issues early.

Reduced Complexity of NFT and Content Management

When a product integrates with wallets (which is the case with NFTs), this inevitably means dealing with third-party APIs and blockchain interactions, media decoding and rendering (e.g., SVG, MP4, GIF, large image assets), and user data security and access rights. The CI/CD pipeline ensures the integration of security tests into builds, tracking for build versioning across mobile, backend, and frame firmware, and edge case handling (e.g., missing metadata or corrupted files).

Design Polish and Performance

In a product focused on aesthetic display and real-time casting, even small UI/UX issues like image stuttering, animation glitches, or casting delays can degrade the experience and discourage users. With established CI/CD, it is possible to employ automated UI snapshot testing to flag regressions in the gallery or casting view, enforce performance budgets (e.g., app size, frame rate), and keep testers synced with the latest version using TestFlight or Firebase for Beta deployment.

Structure the Software Development Life Cycle

Structuring the SDLC into distinct continuous integration phases, such as source, build, test, and deploy, provides clarity and ensures that each stage of development is given the attention it deserves:

1. Source phase: Listens for code changes (via webhook) in the VCS (e.g., GitHub) and then pulls the latest source code.
2. Build phase: Uses a separate build environment and a buildspec.yml file to compile or prepare the code.
3. Test phase: Runs automated tests; if any fail, the pipeline stops to prevent bad code from deploying.
4. Deploy phase: If tests pass, the built application is deployed to the target environment (e.g., EC2, Lambda, or S3).

By clearly defining these CI/CD steps, the client could implement best practices at each stage, leading to improved code quality and reduced time-to-market. This structured approach also facilitates better collaboration among team members, as everyone understands their roles and responsibilities within the development process.

Use Blue/Green Deployment 

Blue/green deployment is a release strategy that reduces downtime and risk by running two identical production environments: one "blue" (current live version) and one "green" (new version). According to it, the new version of an app gets deployed to the green environment while the blue version remains live. Once the new version is tested and verified, the traffic is switched from blue to green (via a load balancer or DNS change). If something goes wrong, it’s easy to quickly roll back by redirecting traffic back to the blue environment.

Thus, this approach allows for seamless transitions between different versions of the application, minimizing downtime and reducing the risk of introducing bugs into the production environment. This method both improves the user experience and provides a safety net in case issues arise during deployment.

The Results

Following the implementation of the recommended changes, the client saw remarkable results that transformed their development process and product stability. 

Deployment Time Decreased From Hours To Minutes

One of the most significant outcomes was the reduction in deployment time. What once took hours to complete was now accomplished in mere minutes. This dramatic decrease allowed the development team to release new features and updates more frequently, keeping pace with customer demands and market trends. This also improved team morale and enhanced the overall product quality. 

Production Stability Improved

Production stability saw a marked improvement as well. The implementation of CI/CD practices and structured SDLC phases reduced the risk of introducing errors into the production environment. The team could now deploy changes with confidence, knowing that thorough testing and validation had taken place. As a result, customer satisfaction increased, and the product garnered positive feedback from users. 

Onboarding Time Reduced By 40%

One of the most impactful changes was the reduction in onboarding time for new developers. With comprehensive documentation in place and a structured development process, new team members could quickly get on the same page with the team and start contributing effectively. The 40% reduction in onboarding time translated to significant cost savings and allowed the client to scale their team more effectively. 

In conclusion, this tech audit served as a catalyst for change, highlighting the critical need for CI/CD practices and robust documentation. By addressing these gaps, the client managed to transform their product and position themselves for sustainable growth in their quite extraordinary and innovative niche. 

If this story of a transformative technical audit inspired you to take your product to the next level, Axon is here to help. Our full-cycle software development services are designed to turn your business ideas into reality, ensuring scalability, efficiency, and innovation every step of the way. Meanwhile, our tech audit experts won't let manual processes, a lack of documentation, and other development flaws hold you back!