Amazon Q Developer accelerates code modernisation

The business challenge:

• As part of the afl.com.au website and mobile apps, Telstra has an obligation to provide advertisements to the end user. It manages this via a backend API and a wrapper Javascript library over the Google Ad Manager.The current library is old, and difficult to maintain. In addition, a recent analysis performed by the Google Ad team identified several areas where the ad code is not as performant as it could be. The original team that developed the code were no longer available to handover or perform the changes.

The technical challenge:

The technical challenge was to modernise a large legacy JavaScript codebase into reusable, performant, and maintainable React components. This required not only syntactic refactoring but also alignment with current frontend engineering standards, improved modularity, and compatibility with AWS-hosted deployment pipelines.

The solution:

• Amazon Q Developer was used to:- Identify and understand the code in detail;
  – Identify the areas where the code could be improved to meet the latest standards;
  – Identify the areas of the code that are causing delays identified in the Google Ad analysis;
  – modernise the code (as requested by the client);
  – make the code more adjustable and maintainable.
• With a lack of experience with the Ad Framework and Javascript, Amazon Q Developer would be the ideal solution to fast track the rebuild of the library and improve it’s performance. This would reduce the time required to understand the code and rebuild it.

The benefits:

• Code modernisation completed in less than half the usual time
• 70% smaller bundle size (150KB → 45KB)
• 68% faster load times (2.5s → 0.8s)
• 95% test coverage
• 100% type safety with TypeScript
• 92% reduction in code duplication