Chateaux Overhauls DevOps System at Major Marketing Agency

The client sought to improve communication, decrease errors, and improve processing time

Our client’s DevOps system now consists of Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Bamboo – which work together to lessen downtime interdepartmentally and streamline their processes.

The Client was looking for a more effective way for different facets of their corporate QA, Operations and IT teams to interact with one another since they were experiencing time lost due to communication errors, dated and otherwise bad code, and delayed or stalled continuous integrations.

Our Client’s issue was twofold: 1) the DevOps Manager’s limited visibility, which made it difficult to track employee activity, and 2) the absence of streamlined code check-in processes by developers.

Since the DevOps Manager was facing consistent barriers, the continuous integration process was frequently halted. Quite often they faced challenges, and were managing symptoms rather than treating the problem.

Our Client was forced to spend a lot of time fixing DevOps issues (about two days each week), and found that due to the absence of transparency within the departments, employees were working inefficiently, with several people working on the same project at the same time and undoing or redoing one another’s work.

This burned time was used at the expense of developing systems and code for clients, as well as halting growth and development within our client.

Chateaux Senior Technologist, Yathendra Lingam, looked at their current processes – wherein several days each week were lost due to fixing bad code and communication errors – and developed a strategy to integrate four systems together in a tool chain that follows below:

• Install Bitbucket and import Git Repository and integrate with Jira
• Upgrade Jira to the most current version and implement Feature and Workflow Enhancements as well as resolve issues.
• Install Bamboo and integrate Bamboo with Jira and Bitbucket then setup Bamboo for continuous integration.
• Install Confluence and integrate with Jira

Chateaux designed a DevOps process to work out these problems so they would no longer negatively impact the Client’s production.

As a solution, DevOps is not a single software upgrade; it requires an organizational shift between the three adjacent departments of Software Engineering and IT, Operations and Quality Assurance to work towards a common goal of successful, rapid and reliable software deployment and testing. Getting these three departments to work cohesively is a critical challenge in enterprise DevOps adoption. Chateaux’s DevOps implementation allowed for QA and the IT department to walk forward in-sync and lessen their downtime fixing issues.

Our client’s DevOps system now consists of Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Bamboo – which work together to lessen downtime interdepartmentally and streamline their processes. The systems are difficult to integrate, but after our implementation, they work together seamlessly to streamline multiple checkpoints that help our client proactively avoid issues, such as committing bad code into GIT, and continuous integration breaking down.

Before Chateaux assisted in this DevOps overhaul, their team were spending two days each week fixing issues. Now, those issues no longer exist in their internal systems.

Whereas previously the teams were not synced up, and, there were many instances where inadvertently both of the team members worked on the same projects. Now, there is more transparency and visibility among manager and colleagues; it is easier to manage time allotment and workload now that there is synchronicity and communication.

Our client is a leading market research firm focused on advertising effectiveness, strategic communication, media and brand equity research. They have an extensive global presence, with offices in 55 countries – and have over forty years of advertising, media, brand equity research, and consulting experience.