Ruby on Rails offers the potential of an “open source framework that’s optimised for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity”. However, what happens when your Rails application becomes a monolith and the team working on it grows? Your test suite takes over half an hour to run, you have hundreds of classes and feature development slows to a crawl. Is it possible to maintain rapid development when multiple teams are changing the same application?

In these talks, we’ll explain how we approach large scale development of Ruby web applications at Funding Circle and enabled teams working on separate features to work concurrently on the platform, often deploying code changes multiple times per day.

At Funding Circle, an interesting issue we encountered resulted from divergent conceptual software models and domain models. We solved this through implementing the Repository pattern. This has enabled us to simplify and optimise existing business critical applications in many ways, such as:

• reducing complexity
• keeping code ignorant of persistence
• migrating integration tests masquerading as unit tests to actual unit tests