Insurer gains business productivity with automated code migrations
By the numbers
01 · The challenge
A mid-sized U.S. insurance provider faced growing inefficiencies in maintaining and securing its codebase. Software maintenance was treated as a series of isolated, manual efforts, each change entered as a separate story per repository. When a critical Spring Boot upgrade was needed to address the Spring4Shell vulnerability, the team had to create 32 individual stories, one for each affected repo.
Each repo required a designated migration expert, a senior engineer familiar with the current Spring Boot version and the steps to upgrade safely. The work was triaged by risk, but still took three full weeks and consumed nearly all engineering resources to manually apply and validate changes. Productivity dropped and business-impacting work stalled, an all-too-common pattern for their maintenance efforts.
02 · The solution
With Moderne, the insurer transformed software maintenance into an automated, low-friction part of everyday development. What once required a full team and weeks of effort can now take a single developer part of a day. Moderne identifies where changes are needed, applies updates across all impacted repositories, and provides diff review and mass-scale PR issuance within the platform. The code then follows the normal workflow to test and deploy.
- Accurate impact visibility across the estate.
- Migration expertise encoded into recipes rather than locked in individuals.
- Centralized execution with minimal disruption to teams.
- Clearer boundaries between routine maintenance and technical debt.
03 · The results
In Q4, the development team closed 384 maintenance stories, an 1,100% increase over their previous average. This initially raised concerns that technical-debt work was crowding out business priorities. Instead, the opposite proved true.
Alongside the surge in maintenance, the team also delivered 40 more business stories, a 30% increase in value-added work. With automated migrations, the codebase became easier to work with, and developers no longer had to context-switch between projects, letting them stay focused, move faster, and drive innovation.
See deterministic, estate-wide code change on your own repositories.