# How The Access Group 5x'd engineering output across 250 products and 2,000+ engineers

5x

More pull requests merged than a year ago

480x

Faster on legacy migration tasks

50%

Incoming bugs fixed from report to pull request

2,000+

Engineers using Devin daily

## About the company

[The Access Group](https://www.theaccessgroup.com/) is one of the largest software companies headquartered in the UK, with around 8,500 employees. It runs 20 software businesses and 250 products across healthcare and social care, legal, education, hospitality, construction, ERP, payroll, payments and more.

Industry: Software**[Visit site](https://www.theaccessgroup.com/)**

## Twenty years of acquisitions, and an estate to match

The Access Group is one of the largest software companies headquartered in the UK, with around 8,500 employees and 2,500 in product and engineering. It runs 20 software businesses and 250 products across healthcare and social care, legal, education, hospitality, construction, ERP, payroll, payments and more.

Most of that portfolio was acquired and twenty years of acquisitions left Access with everything from modern cloud services to desktop applications and languages that predate the web.

Access needed to modernize those products fast enough to keep customers on them, while making 20 acquired businesses feel like one software company.

## From pilot to 2,000+ engineers

Access’s investor, HgCapital, introduced the company to Cognition in December 2024. Access had already tried tools including GitHub Copilot, with mixed results.

An early test came from an acquired product with several hundred legacy migration items. James Bolt, Chief Technology Officer, and Jon Coello, Chief Product Officer, estimated that ten of the harder items would take an engineer about two days each.

They gave those ten items to Devin: all ten came back in twenty minutes.

> "That was the moment the penny dropped that this is something that could make a material difference to a larger organization."
>
> — James Bolt, Chief Technology Officer

That result was enough to justify a broader test. Access wanted to know whether Devin could work across the full range of its estate, not just on a single task or a single modern codebase.

The company chose a mix of products for the pilot, ranging from modern systems it expected Devin to handle easily to legacy products it expected to struggle with.

The results challenged that assumption. Older codebases were not necessarily the hardest to work with; how teams structured the work mattered more. For example, on one AngularJS payroll product, the team initially tried to migrate the entire application at once. When that failed, senior engineers solved the hybrid architecture first, then split the migration into smaller components Devin could handle independently.

> "I wasn’t seeking percentage improvements. I’m seeking multipliers."
>
> — James Bolt, Chief Technology Officer

Access then took roughly 100 engineers out of their day jobs for a three-month deep dive. Across that group, pull request throughput quadrupled and DORA metrics exceeded anything they had recorded before.

Those results gave Access the confidence to go company-wide, and within roughly six and a half months, Devin had rolled out to more than 2,000 engineers.

## 5x more merged pull requests than a year ago

Today, Access engineers merge five times as many pull requests as they did a year ago.

Bolt initially assumed that kind of increase had to be hiding a quality problem. Instead, escaped defects fell, test automation coverage rose, and open customer-reported issues reached an all-time low.

The additional capacity also made projects viable that Access previously would not have attempted.

## Rebuilding a 20-year-old system for the web

Proclaim, Access’s legal case-management system, was one of the hardest modernization projects in the estate.

The 20-year-old desktop product included a workflow engine written in a proprietary language that runs nowhere outside the application. Over time, customers had accumulated 700 to 800 bespoke workflow commands.

Rebuilding those workflows had never been worth attempting.

With Devin, Access rebuilt them in JavaScript and Azure Durable Functions in six to nine months while keeping the same backend, allowing existing customers to move to the web without a separate migration event.

## Increasing customer satisfaction with modern products

Delta, Access’s warehouse-management product, still ran as a desktop application customers accessed through Citrix.

The team used Devin to understand the legacy database and application behavior, build APIs covering the existing functionality, and create a responsive web front end with a 3D warehouse map.

Two months after starting, Access shipped the new product to a customer.

The customer assumed it was a proof of concept and they had understood the full product to be roughly three years away.

Modernization also broadened the kinds of work individual engineers could take on. Engineers who spent decades in VB6, C# desktop applications and Progress are now shipping React front ends, APIs and cloud services, while web engineers can work with older systems they previously would not have known how to navigate.

That expansion went beyond technology stacks. One QA engineer on Director of Engineering Luke Bradshaw’s team became a highly productive software engineer within a year.

> "We have unlocked talent that we didn’t know we had."
>
> — James Bolt, Chief Technology Officer

For Access, modernization has direct business consequences. Customers on the oldest products are often the ones most likely to leave. Access has seen customer satisfaction improve on products where Devin landed first, and some customers have ended competitive evaluations early after seeing the pace of delivery.

## Automating bug fixing at scale

The increase in engineering capacity has also changed how Access handles software quality and maintenance.

One team built a workflow that takes an incoming issue, reproduces it, analyzes the code, applies a fix, runs tests and a security scan, and returns a pull request.

It now handles roughly half of incoming bugs from report to pull request without an engineer taking a first pass. Some products keep a human validation step before shipping; others have removed the human from the workflow entirely.

On products running the workflow, bug backlogs have fallen from hundreds of issues to single figures. The approach has since spread across the group.

> "Automation is key here, because humans will not be able to keep up with the sheer volume of source code we have."
>
> — Conor Whelan, Chief Information Officer

Access is now working toward a much more aggressive target: zero bugs across the estate.

## Expanding who can build software

Devin has also pushed software development beyond traditional engineering teams.

Product teams can now prototype implementations and put them in front of customers before asking engineering to take them to production.

At one recently acquired ERP business, a product manager with no engineering background took an existing API from her product, built a new front end against it on the Access Evo platform, and deployed it by the end of her first day. Customers had been asking for the feature for six months.

Access has also created small functional engineering teams inside sales, marketing, customer success, support, finance, HR and technology. They build internal software that previously would never have made the engineering backlog.

Engineering leaders are building again too. Instead of finding several uninterrupted hours to code, a leader can define a feature, start a Devin session, go into meetings and review the result afterwards.

> "It’s brought back some of that magic people get when they first start working in software engineering."
>
> — Adam Lonsdale, AI Adoption, Acceleration, Tooling, & LLM Ops

## Changing how 2,000+ engineers work

As Devin increased the amount of work individual engineers could take on, Access changed both the size of its teams and how they worked.

Smaller, more focused teams proved more productive, so squads of seven to ten engineers became pods of three or four. Larger teams became smaller units that could move independently.

The development cadence sped up too. Two-week sprints became one week, some teams dropped stand-ups for asynchronous work, and story-point estimation went away because work was moving too quickly for the old estimation process to be useful.

Teams also moved away from long user-story backlogs and toward RFCs and architecture decision records, giving Devin the technical and product context needed to work effectively.

Access then had to spread those working patterns across more than 2,000 engineers.

Paul Joslin, Director of Engineering, AI, studied why some teams were pulling ahead. The strongest teams were grounding Devin in the architecture, conventions and standards of a specific product, then encoding repeatable practices as playbooks.

Access documented those practices, ran company-wide lunch-and-learns, and asked teams to publish internal case studies showing how they got from zero to one.

The demos accelerated adoption. Teams working in old languages showed four or five weeks of modernization work completed in 40 to 50 minutes.

> "We made it go a bit viral. We gave it to some people early to understand the power of what they could achieve, rather than a top-down enablement, and that turned into ‘I want this, I want this.’"
>
> — Adam Lonsdale, AI Adoption, Acceleration, Tooling, & LLM Ops

Access’s central enablement team also built its own operational layer around Devin. Using Cognition’s session insights API, the team combined Devin session data with Access’s delivery data to identify where engineers were struggling and surface practices that were working elsewhere.

Access used that data to build Devin Coach, which automatically guided engineers toward more successful patterns. Cognition later built its own coaching experience into Devin.

Every product team now presents how it built something, not just what it built. Every couple of months, all 20 software businesses come together to compare progress on their flagship rebuilds.

## Making 20 software businesses feel like one

The increase in engineering capacity has also accelerated Access’s broader platform strategy.

Access wants its 20 software companies in the Group to operate as one portfolio and to move from being its customers’ system of record to what Coello calls a “system of action”: software that lets customers act on their data through agents and workflows.

Modernizing individual products fast enough makes that strategy much more practical.

The same work is also helping Access make those products more consistent. Joslin found one team that had learned to give Devin the context and playbooks needed to produce strong UI. Access took those practices and turned them into the Evo design system used across the group.

## The partnership

Access adopted Devin early and at unusual scale, which meant Cognition’s engineers worked closely with its teams throughout the rollout.

Cognition presented to Access’s engineering organization globally, worked directly with individual product teams, and maintained a weekly checkpoint with Access to review session data, problems teams were hitting and changes needed in the product.

That feedback has shaped Devin itself.

Windows support and the CLI, for example, became important as Access pushed Devin into .NET 4.8 and desktop-era products. Access also built Devin Coach using Cognition’s APIs; Cognition later built its own coaching experience into Devin.

> "There are examples where we’ve had a call and said this would be a really helpful feature, or a really helpful API, and at that same checkpoint call the next week, it’s deployed, it’s in production, it’s ready for us to use. There’s even an example where someone started building a feature within the same meeting we were in."
>
> — Adam Lonsdale, AI Adoption, Acceleration, Tooling, & LLM Ops

For Access, the speed of that feedback loop changed the nature of the relationship.

> "People talk about partnerships all the time. Every vendor wants to build a partnership, but not everybody ends up delivering one. We feel as if we’ve come on your journey with you, and we’ve learned with you."
>
> — Conor Whelan, Chief Information Officer

## Where Access is going

Access expects the engineering role to keep broadening.

Joslin sees the traditional front-end and back-end split giving way to engineers who own problems end-to-end. The next step is orchestration: giving agents sufficient context and reusable skills to break down larger projects into smaller pieces and run multiple strands of work in parallel.

For Access’s existing products, the goal is to keep moving heritage software onto its platform and expand automated bug fixing across more of the estate.

Whelan evaluates the investment in two ways. The first is conventional: throughput, DORA metrics and cost per unit of delivery.

The second is the backlog of ambition that becomes reachable when engineering capacity is no longer the constraint.

Projects like the Proclaim rewrite were not simply taking too long. Access would not have attempted them at all.

> "Like a lot of software companies, our ambition and our innovative thoughts always outpaced our actual ability to deliver them - and that’s not really true anymore."
>
> — Jon Coello, Chief Product Officer