Jenkins is the way to take the pressure off your dev teams
Accelerating and Enhancing Customer Care
Building a better software delivery lifecycle for healthcare insurance.
Background: Peter Carenza is part of a regional team of a well-known health insurer that included manager James Dean, team lead Dawn Cox, and DevOps specialist, Louis Kinnick. Together, they had to migrate from a build system that was so antiquated it forced users to build their own batch scripting to facilitate complex builds and unit testing. Furthermore, developers in the company had no way of using this old build system to incorporate code quality and code/component security.
Goals: Speeding up and enhancing the software delivery lifecycle for this healthcare insurer.
"Jenkins is fast, versatile, and easy to enhance and upgrade. It can make the most complex automation tasks "breathable.“
Solution & Results: We replaced our RTC/Jazz build engines with their Jenkins counterparts, and proceeded to write Jenkins pipelines as templates — automation code for build, test, and deploy -- that allowed users to customize details through the use of build properties.
We used Jenkins' wide array of plugins to incorporate new development tools for code security, code quality, inline troubleshooting, feedback loops, and governance. We also automated integration with our deployment solution, and suddenly we found a whole realm of possibilities using environment gates, continuous delivery and deployment.
And that wasn’t all! A segment of our team was broken off to handle corporate patch delivery. Not only were we able to deliver that seamlessly, but Jenkins allowed us to mass-test the servers (or single out a server or patch group) with the click of a button. Jenkins pipelines are the best thing we have come across in our transformation to Agile. It’s used to automate our entire end-to-end development process and utilize Scripted Pipelines to abstract every single team’s unique build.
For capabilities: We used Scripted DSL pipelines to code five different build types and run all of our builds through those parameterized pipelines. We use Build Failure Analysis to maintain a large troubleshooting and diagnosis database for common build and delivery issues. And we use Extended Email to deliver detailed, visually pleasing notifications that provide all the feedback the developer needs to analyze the progress of their build. Though we have migrated from Jazz Builds to Jenkins, we still use Jazz Source Control, and the Team Concert plugin offers an amazing bridge to the rest of our pipeline.
Our results?
shortened release cycles from months to days.
reduced our service call frequency by half with the use of Build Failure Analysis
widespread patch testing has been automated, reducing the need to have a rep from every development team on a patch validation
by incorporating an open-source Jenkins solution over Jazz build engine, we saved thousands of dollars on licenses
nearly elimination of custom build scripts in favor of standardized wide scope solutions