Fearlessly Rewriting Code

The Hut Group (THG) is a fast–growing global eCommerce retail platform that brings brands direct to consumers. “There are just so many different things happening”, says Rob Hannay, the Developer Lead for Checkout, “it's exciting to be part of different projects and services.”

As a retailer, the checkout process is the source of revenue, and critical for their business. Rob's team has been working to improve the conversion rate and the experience of Checkout with an ambitious redesign and rewrite using React.

Because they are replacing the existing business logic encoded into old JSP pages, they need to be careful to recreate the expected behavior as the logic moves from the server to the client-side. “You can control the backend environment,” says Rob, “But the customer is going to run devices and browsers that we can't predict or plan for.”

Rob Hannay

Checkout Developer Lead

TrackJS gave us the confidence to be fearless with our deployments; not worrying about Internet Explorer issues or the WeChat browser. We can get code out there and fail fast.

“TrackJS has really improved the detection of issues. We've had a few significant things that weren't caught before deployment, but TrackJS immediately told us what was happening and the impact of the error.” Like a configuration problem THG had with Apple Pay, which TrackJS immediately flagged preventing thousands of dollars in lost sales.

“TrackJS has made us fearless with our deployments,” remarks Rob. Every time Rob's team does a deployment, they have the TrackJS dashboard open watching for new errors or anything that might be related to what we're doing. If an error “looks a bit dodgy”, Rob and his team can quickly collaborate, sharing the error URL with other developers or testers.