Jenkins is the way to add stability to the overall software delivery process

Building a Workflow Management System for a Telecom Giant

Submitted By Jenkins User Ajit Gunge
ith the task to improve workflow efficiencies for a telco provider, the team at Virtusa used Jenkins to do just that. Now build times are 10x faster and development cycles shortened from 20 days to a week.
Organization: Virtusa, IT consultant for a UK-based telecommunications company
Team Members: Abhijit MIsal, Software Engineer, and Nirmiti Pawar, Software Engineer, both of Virtusa
Programming Languages: Java Platform: Linux Version Control System: GitLab Build Tool: Maven
Community Support: Spoke with colleagues and peers, Networking at Jenkins event, and relied on Jenkins.io websites & blogs

Testing improvements allow for aggressive development with fewer errors.

Background: Virtusa is a global provider of innovative products and services that create operational efficiency for their clients using digital labor, future-proof operational and IT platforms, and rationalization and modernization of IT applications infrastructure.  In his role as lead consultant, Ajit Gunge worked with software engineers Abhijit MIsal and Nirmiti Pawar to build a workflow management system for a UK-based telecommunications powerhouse. 

With a monthly release cycle for the application the operations team always had to wait for new features as well as critical bug fixes. This was delaying the overall software delivery which in turn delayed the number of customer orders getting delivered on the ground. Ultimately, this had a negative impact on end-user experiences.

Goals: To build a more efficient workflow for the operations team. We knew we had to increase flexibility and reduce the manual effort. We knew we would be able to accelerate our software delivery by automating our Continuous Integration process.

"Jenkins allowed us to deliver more orders to our end customers by increasing our workflow application and enabling operations to be more efficient and productive."
image— Ajit Gunge, Lead Consultant, Virtusa

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Solution & Results: The problems end-users were faced with included delayed software features and, at times, buggy software. These problems were solved by an accelerated delivery process using Jenkins. The developers were informed at an early stage of software coding where the bugs lie, and they were able to resolve them quickly. Jenkins enabled us to quickly integrate the software , and now, with daily builds and a CI process in place, we see more frequent deliveries and fewer defects, finally enriching the user experience. The operations team was able to work more efficiently on the software and ultimately, was able to deliver more orders to our client’s end customers.

Plugins that we found useful to meet our goal of building a workflow management system with Jenkins include: Continuous integration and code pipelines, Build Name setter, Build PipelIne, Cobertura, Delivery Pipeline, Email Extension, Git, Jacoco, Parameterized Trigger, Rebuilder Plugin, Workspace Cleanup, HTML publisher, and Amazon EC2.

Our results? 

  • build times are 10x faster 

  • development cycles shortened from 20 days to a week

  • End-users report overall quality of the software has increased and is more bug free