We had the 1st CISIG of 2014 - Not only did it bring value, there have also been developments outside of the group!
One of the Dev leads (for IOS) had been making progress with a CI pipeline prior to the creation of the CISIG. He kindly presented where his team are now & what their next moves are.
Their main focus has been the automation of JIRA tickets based on certain Git activities - No more manual copy & pasting of commit messages.
After the IOS team walkthrough, another Dev lead & SCM talked us through their plans of a POC for packaging config changes into releases.
Achieving this would be a massive milestone - currently, Testers are responsible for manually committing the config changes into the SCM repo & then bouncing the server so that the new configs are picked up.
I find this process very time consuming, stressful & bug isolation very tricky - is it the code, or have the configs not been updated correctly? (I’ve found its a great delay tactic for the Devs)
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###UPDATE###
Config changes are now being delivered as part of a package - no need for manual editing of configs in test environments!
Also, the Dev Manager of another team has added the creation of a CI pipeline to his list of projects & assigned one of his team to that project - Get. In.
This is real progress & hopefully will accelerate the adoption of CI across the organisation.
First things first - we need to deliver the CI project alongside another project to demonstrate the concepts & the potential value CI can bring.
This is a Java project, so hopefully the work with the packaging of code + configs can be applied here as well.
The next CISIG is planned for the end of February - lets see where we’re at then.
That’s it for now,
Duncs