Client’s challenges
The client doubled the number of web shops along with their expansion to other countries and, at the same time, decided to decrease the time between GoLives, in order to release more often. With the existing processes and the degree of automation, this was not possible. There was a lack of maturity in processes: they were in large percent not properly structured, not homogeneous enough, and mostly manual, and there was no documentation and compliance with the processes. The client’s deployments lasted for several hours and failed in more than 50% of the cases, which led to weekly night shifts.
Another issue was that the coordination between development, operations/deployment, test/QA was time consuming and error prone. Additionally, the test environments did not resemble productive environments, therefore errors were not reproduceable, which lead to many failed hotfixes. The client had to solve these problems as soon as possible, should they want to increase the speed and quality, keep up with the release cycle, and not lose customers due to downtimes and bugs in their web-shops.
Sixsentix’s solution
The Sixsentix solution consisted of three phases:
• Assessment and consulting of the processes and organization
• Implementation of the continuous deployment solution
• Optimization of processes and the automation solution
In the first step, the Sixsentix solution included the evaluation of the client’s existing processes. Sixsentix performed consolidation and optimization of the processes and then designed the process automation from development, build, configuration, deployment, and test. With the client’s review and approval, Sixsentix proceeded to the next step – implementation of automation, wherever necessary. The next step included expansion of these processes and automation solutions to other fields, e.g. SAP system copy from production environments to test environments.
In the final step Sixsentix performed optimization of the processes (improved error handling, automated reporting, zero downtime deployments…).
“The client solved business-critical issues with Sixsentix. Now they have a significant increase in the number of test cycles. The client no longer has to trigger out test automation tool manually: once their development is finished, the deployment happens automatically and, in turn, triggers the test automation tool, which can and does run in the middle of the night – whenever the system is ready – with a detailed report on which test cases failed. The client’s deployment time is massively reduced, as well as the number of failed deployments. The web-shops updates happen without any downtime, as the upgrades take place in the background. The client can achieve excellence and deliver outstanding results much faster.”
Sixsentix Project Lead
Value delivered
With the help of Sixsentix, the client now has minimal manual intervention between code check-in and the finished test automation. The deployment time is reduced: from several hours of manual work to 15 minutes of automated deployment. Sixsentix has increased the pace of test-deployments from once per week to several times a day. The nightly builds are performed now, scheduled daily at night, including the full automated regression. Another value delivered for the client is that now there is a one-click copy of productive systems to test systems (instead of 2 weeks of manual tasks).
Project results in numbers:
1 .Number of test-cycles per Month: 2 to 20 (+1000%)
2. Reduction of configuration errors at production deployments: 30% to 0% (100%)
3. Reduction of deployment time: 6h to 15 minutes (-96%)
4. Reduction of failed deployments: 50% to <1% (-98%)
5. Reduction of SAP system copy time: 2 weeks to 1 h (-99%)
Sixsentix approach brought about a dramatic increase in speed and quality, with more available time for the client to focus on the core business.
