Considered to be one of the key accelerators for driving rapid technological advancements, DevOps has emerged has a major driver for better application development, faster product releases and feature revisions based on customer feedback. It is estimated that DevOps can decreases time spent on resolving security issues by 50%, provide a 24x faster recovery rates from failures and 3x lower change failure rate.
One of the biggest advantages of DevOps processes is that it tries to eliminate development issues and bottlenecks by including QA, testing and technology operations directly in the development process through constant feedback provided in real-time.
While DevOps has become a ubiquitous practice, optimizing and streamlining DevOps processes remains a challenge. QuEST has been helping customers overcome inherent technical inefficiencies, siloed workflows or lack of standardization of tool sets and in effect, streamline their DevOps processes successfully.
The following example shows how QuEST helped a leading customer streamline their DevOps processes by leveraging Azure DevOps.
Challenge
For the customer, the main challenge was their legacy application along with an old installer used to build the package. The application was built in two different parts, one part used Jenkins and Git for build and source code management while the other part of the application used manual build and release. As the second part of the application was using TFS for source code management, it was old and not the most preferred solution for source code management.
The customer wanted a reliable tool to manage their source code. Thus, the objective was to provide the best possible solution that would address the unified build and release process for the entire application along with the traceability of each work item related to the application development.
As a solution, the QuEST team decided to use Azure DevOps as the most suitable solution vis-à-vis the customer requirements and overall feasibility.
How Azure DevOps (ADO) Helped
The team delivered the following solutions to address customer requirements:
The Azure Pipeline is user friendly and very effective for setting up the pipeline. This service provided the team with Classic and YAML based pipeline creation. When the team initially used the Classic Pipeline creation, it was very easy to setup as it could read the repo and depending on the source code it could automatically present with the set of steps. Once the steps were created, users could make changes as per requirement and create a final pipeline. Since the customer had a legacy installer, the team could leverage the rich set of extensions that ADO has. This enabled to build the legacy installer and streamline the complete build, and release process.
Outcome
The series of solutions mentioned above, transformed the DevOps process and provided a unified view of the complete process to the customer. The customer is currently in the process of implementing security features into the solution by integrating with SonarQube/Veracode.
Future prospects & Learnings