How we Helped our Client Lead a DevOps Transformation and Implement Modern Software Practices
A leading supplier of food products, personal care products, electronics, and clothing to correctional facilities was unable to update their systems with modern features in a timely fashion. This led to an increase in customer complaints.
Because of the unusual setting, these supplies are requested and tracked via kiosks installed in correctional facilities, and must be equipped with stable, secure features and devices.
The company realized they could deploy faster with better quality, and maintain their market leadership, by applying DevOps practices.
Enter Centric: A Modern Software Solution to Solve Customer Complaints
As their partner, we helped them implement DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices. Activities included:
- Launched code branching strategies to enable better feature release control.
- Implemented leading-edge agile practices such as BDD using SpecFlow (.NET).
- Led DevOps testing and deployment using Docker and container orchestration
The Results: Faster, Higher Quality Delivery and Market Leadership
We tackled multiple aspects of DevOps across multiple projects:
- We created a DevOps continuous delivery pipeline using GO along with a trunk-based development version control strategy. These practices were introduced to reduce the time between the developer writing code and reaching production, while reducing the number of defects across the system. This immediately reduced the risk of regressions and conflicts. It also automated, and sped up, the code merge process. One team reduced their deployment time from a multi-day event to a 20-minute push button action.
- During the requirements elaboration process, Behavior Driven Design (BDD) improved the quality of the requirements by reducing ambiguity and using real world scenarios. Having everyone aware of their roles and expectations can reduce requirements-based defects by almost 80 percent.
- Implementing BDD also laid the groundwork to introduce end to end test automation into the sprint boundary, greatly shortening feedback loops. Using containerization allowed the teams to focus on developing within a common computing environment without concern for underlying hardware differences. Now, what is tested is what is released.
These modern software practices allowed the company to deliver faster, with higher quality, while increasing responsiveness to customers. Results from this DevOps transformation gave the company an edge, allowing it to remain the market leader.
These modern software practices allowed the company to deliver faster, with higher quality, while increasing responsiveness to customers. Results from this DevOps transformation gave the company an edge, allowing it to remain the market leader.
