Jenkins is the way to add stability to the overall software delivery process
Building a Workflow Management System for a Telecom Giant
Testing improvements allow for aggressive development with fewer errors.
Background: Virtusa is a global provider of innovative products and services that create operational efficiency for their clients using digital labor, future-proof operational and IT platforms, and rationalization and modernization of IT applications infrastructure. In his role as lead consultant, Ajit Gunge worked with software engineers Abhijit MIsal and Nirmiti Pawar to build a workflow management system for a UK-based telecommunications powerhouse.
With a monthly release cycle for the application the operations team always had to wait for new features as well as critical bug fixes. This was delaying the overall software delivery which in turn delayed the number of customer orders getting delivered on the ground. Ultimately, this had a negative impact on end-user experiences.
Goals: To build a more efficient workflow for the operations team. We knew we had to increase flexibility and reduce the manual effort. We knew we would be able to accelerate our software delivery by automating our Continuous Integration process.
"Jenkins allowed us to deliver more orders to our end customers by increasing our workflow application and enabling operations to be more efficient and productive.“
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Solution & Results: The problems end-users were faced with included delayed software features and, at times, buggy software. These problems were solved by an accelerated delivery process using Jenkins. The developers were informed at an early stage of software coding where the bugs lie, and they were able to resolve them quickly. Jenkins enabled us to quickly integrate the software , and now, with daily builds and a CI process in place, we see more frequent deliveries and fewer defects, finally enriching the user experience. The operations team was able to work more efficiently on the software and ultimately, was able to deliver more orders to our client’s end customers.
Plugins that we found useful to meet our goal of building a workflow management system with Jenkins include: Continuous integration and code pipelines, Build Name setter, Build PipelIne, Cobertura, Delivery Pipeline, Email Extension, Git, Jacoco, Parameterized Trigger, Rebuilder Plugin, Workspace Cleanup, HTML publisher, and Amazon EC2.
Our results?
build times are 10x faster
development cycles shortened from 20 days to a week
End-users report overall quality of the software has increased and is more bug free