Code Collective has always had a strong focus on DevOps and Continuous Integration (CI). We’ve invested heavily into refining our process, which includes automated triggered builds, tests and single click deployments. For many years, we used CruiseControl.Net (CCNet) for build management, together with Mercurial for source control. And although they were aging, they worked well.
Our desire to move to a new DevOps platform was in part to keep up with the times, but predominantly driven by the limitations we began to experience, our struggling server, and our desire to leverage some of the new features that modern platforms would allow. Azure DevOps attracted us with its Pipelines, Dashboarding, Test Impact Analysis, and integration with Git and Azure Boards.
And so we consolidated our issue tracking software, our source control tool and our build/deployment management server into a single platform.
Git posed a natural fit to our previous Mercurial source control solution. Jira’s wide flexibility would be sacrificed for a more compact option from Azure Boards, while still enabling enough configurability for our needs. The Azure Test Plan integration was a bonus, as this was something we hadn’t adopted in Jira. The transition from CCNet was the most challenging, with many projects configured in CCNet. But the paradigm worked, with our triggered builds and one-click deployments being rewritten as Build/Release pipelines.
The benefit of integrating our code with our issue tracking and build manager is clear. We have richer dashboards, deployments are integrated, and the single platform works well. As its cloud based, we no longer have to manage a separate (aging) server and can enjoy fast, efficient builds and releases.