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 knowledgeable about the steps needed to upgrade to the secure version. The work was triaged based on risk, but still took three full weeks and consumed nearly all engineering resources to manually apply and validate changes. As a result, productivity dropped and business-impacting work stalled—an all-too-common pattern for their maintenance efforts.
Insurance
20 Million
1,200
1100%
Increase in maintenance stories closed
30%
Increase in business stories completed
1
One developer effort over part of a day, using Moderne
The Solution
Maintenance is no longer an isolated project—it’s now a continuous, efficient part of software delivery.
With Moderne, the insurance provider 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 just part of a day.
Moderne automation is able to identify where changes are needed and applies updates across all impacted repositories, providing diff review and mass-scale PR issuance within the platform. Then the code follows the normal workflow to test and deploy. Most of the overhead and work of code migration is handled by the Moderne Platform.
The impact extends beyond automation
Accurate impact visibility
Moderne provides deep insight into source code and transitive dependencies—enabling proactive, automated maintenance at scale.
Migration expertise encoded
Instead of relying on senior developers to manage each migration, OpenRewrite recipes carry the logic and version knowledge needed to safely upgrade systems.
Centralized execution, minimal disruption
Developers can launch migration campaigns that span the codebase while keeping focus on business-critical work.
Clearer boundaries between maintenance and technical debt
Routine upgrades are now categorized as maintenance, reducing the stigma of “bad code” and giving teams a better lens on what actually needs refactoring.
I just wanted to sing some praises about my experience with Moderne. During my team’s review of our quarterly metrics for the year, we noticed a productivity increase since we started using the Moderne Platform.
Results
In Q4, the development team closed 384 maintenance stories—an 1,100% increase over their previous average. This dramatic rise 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 Moderne’s automated migrations, the codebase became easier to work with, and developers no longer had to context-switch between projects. Freed from manual migrations, they were able to stay focused, move faster, and drive innovation.
Dive Deeper
Automate framework migrations across repositories
Automate code transformations across repos to adopt new frameworks, upgrade packages, and decommission legacy software—without slowing down your team.
Automated code refactoring at enterprise scale
Moderne accelerates large‑scale code changes across repositories—streamlining migrations, enforcing standards, and reducing tech debt with precision.
AI-driven refactoring for fintech codebases
Learn how OpenRewrite and AI agents automate code changes across thousands of fintech repos—improving developer workflows and accelerating modernization at scale.
