Energy company cuts platform modernization time by more than 40% with N-iX

The client is a US-based company that specializes in solar panel installation solutions. Its platform supports sales teams with territory management and customer engagement tools. The platform also includes integrated billing that connects payment processing, communication channels, and accounting software.

The client set out to modernize its core sales platform without slowing the business. Sales teams rely on the platform from lead generation to billing, so development had to continue while developers shipped new features.

At the same time, the client wanted the platform back under vendor support with regular security patches. This would reduce compliance risk and enable the use of current tools and frameworks.

The client also needed rapid delivery. At kickoff, it compared delivery options, chose AI-assisted delivery, and funded the AI tooling.

Test safety net built with AI

The platform’s existing tests were the starting point for a wider safety net that could catch breaking changes across five major upgrades. N-iX started by expanding test coverage. A technical architect analyzed the codebase and defined the AI approach.

N-iX ran this work through its AI Development Lifecycle (AI-DLC), a structured process where AI assists each step and engineers supervise the results. The team split the platform into units and used AI to analyze each one for untested code and coverage gaps. N-iX then built custom AI skills that worked as an assembly line. The AI planned a test strategy, wrote unit and integration tests to project conventions, and reviewed its own output before engineers did. Engineers then reviewed every pull request.

The suite grew to 21,703 automated tests with 70.2% line coverage. The analysis also surfaced existing defects, which the team documented with severity ratings. N-iX added regression tests for confirmed issues, giving the client a prioritized backlog to act on.

Staged framework upgrades without a feature freeze

N-iX upgraded through intermediate LTS versions, so each step served as a validation checkpoint. The platform moved to Django 5.2 LTS and Python 3.12 in stages, which kept the risk of breaking changes contained at every step.

Along the way, the team also upgraded supporting frameworks and libraries. AI scanned release notes for breaking changes and rewrote the affected code across the platform. It also handled the migration changes required by the newer framework versions. N-iX tracked formal risks with documented controls and mitigation plans.

After each step, AI analyzed test failures to separate real regressions from brittle tests. The full test suite ran with zero failures after the final framework phase.

The client’s developers kept shipping features throughout. Each week, N-iX pulled their changes and used AI to find what needed updating. The team then merged that work into the modernization branch, so the client never had to pause development.

Integration and dependency modernization

In the last phase, N-iX updated about 90 direct dependencies to current stable versions. The team isolated each integration with breaking changes in its own release cycle.

• QuickBooks Web Connector: A hand-written SOAP handler replaced the abandoned spyne library, preserving all 11 RPC operations and the existing WSDL contract.
• Nylas: N-iX rebuilt this integration on the vendor’s current API after the older SDK went unmaintained, and covered every call site with new tests.
• Stripe: AI inventoried 55 call sites, and the team validated the upgrade with Stripe CLI simulation and manual test flows.
• OpenAI: N-iX built a test safety net for all API methods before upgrading. The Chat Completions API proved non-breaking.
• PDF processing: AI mapped old-to-new API calls from PyPDF2 to pypdf and generated migration patches, validated against a PDF test suite.

By applying its AI-DLC alongside a staged upgrade path, N-iX helped the client secure its core platform without pausing product work:

• Faster delivery: AI-assisted delivery cut the modernization timeline by more than 40%, from an estimated 12+ months to 7, so the client returned to feature development sooner;
• Closed security gaps: 26 packages with known CVEs and no upstream patches were eliminated, and vendor support through 2028 means the platform keeps receiving security patches;
• No production freeze: The client’s team shipped features throughout the 7-month modernization;
• Test-first foundation for future upgrades: 21,703 automated tests with 70.2% line coverage, built with AI before the upgrades began, now detect breaking changes across the 350K-line codebase;
• Added value beyond scope: The team documented 886 existing issues, 97 of them critical, and delivered 460 regression tests that flag when each one is fixed;
• Reliable connections to key business systems: N-iX modernized the integrations behind payments, messaging, and accounting, so the client no longer depends on tools their vendors have stopped supporting.