Claude in Production: Halving Merge Time at Embrace

About Embrace

Accedia has partnered with Embrace since 2016 and remained its development partner after the 2023 acquisition by Aareon, a provider of SaaS solutions for the European property industry. Embrace, headquartered in Groningen in the Netherlands, builds a cloud platform for housing corporations, municipalities and other organizations. Embrace Social is its product for collaboration and knowledge sharing, next to its CRM, housing and customer-portal products. Over the years Accedia’s consultants took on more and more of the core of Embrace Social: its .NET back-end, its notification service and parts of the identity layer, working as a full part of Embrace’s own team, on its backlog and in its delivery process.

The Challenge: Uniting Two Systems with 0 Downtime for Their Users

Embrace ran two intranet products side by side. Embrace Workspace, the legacy product, was still in daily use at many customers; Embrace Social was its successor. The two had to become one without disrupting the customers who relied on the old product every day. Accedia’s team took on both, modernising the Social back-end while keeping Embrace Workspace running, with a small team on a large codebase: the Social back-end alone is close to 290,000 lines of C# across 68 projects.

In 2026 Embrace moved its engineering to a spec-driven, AI-assisted way of working. Accedia’s team worked hard to adopt AI-SDLC on a live codebase while keeping the same level of quality and delivery speed.

The AI-driven Approach Behind the Transition

Accedia’s senior consultants form the back-end core of Embrace’s Suite Core/Social team. Over the past eighteen months they authored 86% of the commits on the Social back-end source and 94% on the notification service, and kept the codebase current: 67 of its 68 projects run on .NET 10. The back-end runs on Azure with ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework Core on SQL Server, GraphQL, Elasticsearch, Azure Service Bus and Redis, and integrates with Microsoft 365 through Microsoft Graph. The notification service runs on Azure Functions.

Accedia’s consultants helped build the AI-driven SDLC they now work in, contributing 279 commits to the workflow tooling in six months, and put their own codebase through it. They write the specification and plan with Claude Code, let it implement the change and its tests and open the pull request, and review the result next to the Claude review that runs on every pull request. Two engineers still sign off on every change.

Accedia’s consultants ship features continuously rather than in one large release. In September 2026 we delivered the Microsoft 365 group migration for Embrace Social, which lets customers move a group’s files and members between Microsoft 365 and Embrace. From the work item we had Claude Code produce the specification and plan, implement the change with its tests and create the pull request, with us reviewing the scope up front and the result at the end.

The Impact on Software Delivery and User Satisfaction

Embrace measures the effect on its engineering capacity. On the Social back-end, Claude-assisted development and automated Claude review went live in June 2026. The two months that followed outperformed the Q4 2025 - Q3 2026 period, according to Embrace's Engineering dashboard, confirmed by the product owner's work-mix analysis. Pull requests now close about twice as fast. Typical cycle time (from PR open to merge) dropped from 25–47 hours to 14–19 hours, and the 90th percentile cases, previously stretching to 120–200 hours, now wrap up in around 90. Claude went from handling none of this work to 85% of pull requests within three months of going live, without any drop in human oversight: reviewers per pull request held steady at roughly two throughout.

On the back-end Accedia carries, pull requests now move through review and merge in half the time, with the same number of reviewers on every change. In July and August 2026 the three consultants completed 29% more work items than in the same months a year earlier. Two-thirds of their pull requests trace back to a written specification, and test coverage stands at 53% on the back-end and 72% on the notification service.

The kind of work changed as well. Between the second and the third quarter of 2026 the share of innovation work on the Social back-end more than doubled. Accedia’s consultants delivered 72% of the back-end items in that quarter and four in five maintenance items, taking on the hardening and legacy clean-up so the team could shift capacity to new work.

Since the consolidation onto Embrace Social, platform performance has improved, and users of the consolidated platform report higher satisfaction than with the previous, fragmented setup. Ten years on, the Social back-end that Accedia helped build and has carried, runs on the current .NET, is measured for test coverage on every build, and ships through the same AI-assisted flow as the rest of Embrace’s platform.

As Embrace’s Product Owner Wessel Schillemans put it: “It feels like the developers working on our products with us are as invested in creating something valuable as we are ourselves.”