Bark.com Modernizes Mission-Critical PHP Application With Professional Services From Zend

Bark.com is a world-leading services marketplace with over 7 million customers in 11 countries around the world. Their clients trust Bark.com as the best place to source local professionals for everything from wedding planning to house renovations to karate lessons.

As a digital-first business, Bark.com prides itself on providing a stellar marketplace experience. This iterative and constant drive to improve their user experience is accomplished via frequent and innovative feature additions and constant improvements to their underlying IT infrastructure.

So, when Bark.com engineering team needed to release yet another innovative feature and upgrade one of their mission-critical PHP applications on the same tight timeline, they turned to Zend Professional Services to help get the job done.

Bark.com Faced a Hard Decision

The Bark.com engineering team, as part of a regular evaluation of their codebases, identified the need for a PHP version upgrade on two of their mission-critical applications. However, their engineering team was also tasked with delivering a new, revenue-driving feature for their company on that same deadline.

Both efforts were important and time-sensitive, but the team only had the bandwidth to focus on one of the projects. This left Bark.com leadership looking for a way to extend their engineering team and accomplish both efforts at the same time.

After exploring a variety of options, Bark.com decided to bring in a trusted third party to help upgrade their PHP-based application, freeing their development team to focus on developing the new feature. After carefully weighing a number of options, they chose Zend.

“Zend has a great reputation in the PHP space, and a solid track record for executing successful migration projects. Ultimately, it made our decision very easy.”

Henry Searle, Principal Engineer and Head of Architecture at Bark.com

Bark.com Partners With Zend to Upgrade Their PHP

Once an initial agreement was in place, the Bark.com and Zend teams quickly got to work with scoping, planning, and executing the migration.

The Zend team inspected the codebases, analyzing the libraries and extensions being used and whether they could be upgraded or needed to be replaced as part of the upgrades. The teams actively coordinated on key milestones and code freezes, so the teams actively developing new features wouldn’t be negatively impacted by the upgrade processes.

Once the project was scoped, and an agreed upon timeline was in place, the Zend team started the upgrade processes. Over the course of the next few weeks, the Zend team regularly handed off pieces of the codebases to the Bark.com team for testing, with the team passing back any code that failed acceptance testing. After a few more weeks, all of the code had passed testing and was ready for a phased deployment.

"The Zend team made complex problems within the upgrade process seem simple and straightforward, allowing us to progress as a tech organization without missing a beat.”

Henry Searle, Principal Engineer and Head of Architecture at Bark.com

Bark.com Successfully Upgrades Their PHP and Saves Over 4 Months of Development Time

With the upgraded codebases fully tested and ready for deployment, the team began their plans for a phased rollout to production.

As the upgraded applications were rolled out to production, the Bark.com team was relieved to hear no complaints from their users or internal stakeholders.

It was quickly apparent that the migration was a success, and the Zend team had delivered the project on deadline.

"The Zend team ensured our modernization project was minimally disruptive to our engineering teams, and ultimately saved us upward of 20 weeks of engineering work."

Henry Searle, Principal Engineer and Head of Architecture at Bark.com