Background: Our document generation service started as a pet-project, and it was anticipated to transform it into a startup. In moving through the transition stages, we sought to save as much capital as possible. Simultaneously, we also needed a lightweight CI system that could be used by developers and non-experienced staffers alike.
Goals: Develop a pipeline for running tests and building applications.
"Great community and a large set of plugins made our work easier and more comfortable. Also, Jenkins helped us save money and time."
Solution & Results:
We wanted to experiment with different UI frameworks and to choose one that was most suitable for us. After creating a proof of concept, we spent a lot of time increasing performance and cleaning the codebase. This produced a large set of jobs starting with execution and integration to monitoring performance and conducting e2e tests on each branch before merging.
Not all of our team members had experience with OPS and testing, so we needed plugins for custom reporting of each test we would run. For the demo purposes, we created jobs for each potential customer configured by scripts.
We’re very impressed with Jenkins, and not just because it is free. We love the Pipeline plugin, and Stage View which helped us to improve the visualization of the pipeline. GitHub Branch Source was used to make our work with GitHub more efficient, and as we say, comfortable. Finally, we found Allure to be an excellent tool for analyzing test runs.
The four most significant results are as follows:
we saved money
we set up Jenkins to be suitable for non-experience team members, using a large set of plugins
we created jobs for each potential customer with custom scripts for configuration
we configured pipelines for all kinds of testing