Benefits

• Significant risk reduction and improved release quality achieved
• Manual effort reduced, burden of releasing entire application every week eliminated
• Development and production release cycles cut from hours to minutes

Challenge

A major insurer provided its extensive agent network with weekly updates on competitive products, rates, and other data, enabling them to do comparisons and thus sell more effectively. A Web-based system that delivered the updates comprised more than 2,000 files.

The insurer sought a fast, reliable way to manage the development process and stage weekly software releases. New releases ranged, in the number of added and updated files, from just a few to as many as 70, but always less than 5 percent of the full file-count. A manual procedure was used to stage the entire set of files, and there were no controls set up to identify those changed or added files for a given release.

Risks associated with the release procedure had become unacceptable. Also, concern about the continued quality of future releases was growing.

Stratagem's Solution

A Stratagem Software Configuration Management (SCM) consultant interviewed users to determine their development and release practices. The consultant established goals to improve development control and formulate a new release procedure.

Using the client's existing licenses for an SCM tool, Stratagem's consultant placed the system's 2,000+ files under SCM control. Files that were changed or added for the weekly releases could now be easily identified via a release tag. Changes between releases could also be tracked and viewed at any time.

Stratagem adapted the release tag to extract the new or changed files from the SCM archive repository. Now only those files added or changed for the weekly release needed to be staged to the release area, not the entire set of files as was previously required.

The development and release cycles are controlled by the procedures that Stratagem put into place using the SCM tool and repository. Stratagem also provided the client with training and documentation on the new procedure and SCM tool's use.

Result

Stratagem's SCM solution gave the client's development team a timely and effective solution to manage the weekly development and release process. Because the entire set of 2,000 files could be narrowed down to only those files that been added or altered, the delivery time was cut from hours to just minutes. The client's team used the time saved for additional development and testing.