Case Study: Vanguard achieves improved code quality and safer monolith-to-microservices refactoring with Neo4j

Improving Code Quality with Graph Technology

Vanguard, one of the world’s largest investment management firms with more than $3.5 trillion under management, needed to refactor massive Java monoliths—some archives containing millions of lines of code—into microservices. The effort was hampered by technical debt, dead code, and a lack of scalable dependency visibility (desktop tools crashed and spreadsheets proved unmanageable), making impact analysis and coordinated refactoring across teams very difficult.

Vanguard adopted Neo4j to model every jar, service and dependency as a graph, automatically ingesting build artifacts and enriching them with architecture data. Using graph analytics, visualizations and a code-quality scorecard, the team performs impact analyses, enforces best practices, reduces risk, manages technical debt, and tracks measurable improvements in code quality while guiding developers toward a consistent microservices architecture.

Vanguard

John Lavin

Enterprise Architect