Telecompaper is a well respected, independent research and publishing company focussed on the telecommunications industry. They have been keeping professionals in the telecoms industry up-to-date since 2000.
The old way
Telecompaper was looking for a way to streamline development.
Developers had been struggling. There were no unit tests. They were manually building the code, zipping it, copying it to the server, and extracting it there to update the website. Those steps were subsequently repeated when a release was deployed to production. Changes to the web.config were being handled manually - and not always correctly. It was an error-prone process, consumed considerable time, and was resulting in unnecessary downtime.
An automated CI/CD pipeline
As part of a more comprehensive review and development assistance package, GistLens replaced the old manual release methods over which the Telecompaper development team had been struggling with a modern Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline.
We achieved that by leveraging the functionality available within Microsoft Azure DevOps.
Why is this a good thing?
It saved the Telecompaper development team 30+ minutes every time they wanted to deploy something.
It meant they could easily roll back changes if anything went wrong.
The new process is significantly less error prone because there were no more manual steps.
The functionality that users were viewing on the server will now always reflect the state of the code that the developers are looking at.
Working towards better test coverage
Removing technical debt and improving the quality of the codebase is an ongoing process, but Telecompaper is on the right track. The unit and integration testing coverage is not yet sufficient to permit an automated deployment from commit all the way through to production. It will automatically deploy to a quality assurance environment, but from there a manual review step is required before promoting the release. The team is now working towards improving the code coverage and eliminating bugs through a robust pull request review process, with a view towards fully automating releases to production.