As software development, integration, and delivery processes continue to speed up with increased demand and growth throughout the industry there is a growing need to evolve our approaches to ensure solid and quality code arrives in the hands of every user along with a constant flow of new features and changes. Quick releases, stringent SLAs for uptime and service, massive and quick scale-up/down needs, accessibility, localization, and a vast array of user devices are some of the challenges that can cause significant issues internally and for our customers without the right changes. How do we create robust, automated, high-quality pipelines enabling quality throughout the process?  How do we do that while maintaining an aggressive release cadence?  

We are constantly evolving our own approaches and have learned some important lessons along the way on how to build in quality at each phase with automation and integration of tools and processes throughout our CI/CD pipeline.  Several critical pieces enabled us to significantly decrease our hotfixes and interruptions in production while increasing our delivery of features to our customer base. We have also gone from massive downtime for each release in each region worldwide to zero downtime releases with better automated and manual verification tests along the way improving the efficiency of our engineers internally and our customers in production. Still learning, but I’m excited to share some lessons we have learned and insights that could help others improve CI/CD pipelines and deploy quality applications!

Key Takeaways:

• Some approaches and tools can assist in combining good quality assurance processes with modern CI/CD approaches for the delivery of high-quality software.
• How to build in automation to help support quick integration and release timeframes, especially when starting with little or no automation coverage
• Other best practices we have found helpful as we built in better quality internally for engineering and addressing the most critical pieces for customers in production.

Richard Robinson currently lead the DevOps, QA, Infrastructure, and IT engineering groups supporting all operations for BongoLearn, Inc. Bongo creates video training, learning, and assessment workflows and technologies embedded in many of the prominent Learning Management Systems in the EdTech industry. Richard has a background in QA, automation, and managing QA and systems engineering teams for large and small companies over the last 22 years. He is passionate about quality and ensuring customers and companies are able to effectively use technology to solve their problems without needing to worry about issues and problems that plague our world and get in the way of real work.