Jenkins is the way to understand and simplify your software workflows

Talentcloud: Talent management in an e-learning Environment

Submitted By Jenkins User Javier Méndez Veira
Improving the development of learning technologies, applications, and service-based-solutions to deliver digital learning in companies and academic institutions.
Organization: Netex Learning, https://www.netexlearning.com
Industries: Education and training
Programming Languages: PHP, Angular
Version Control Systems: GitLab
Community Support: Jenkins.io websites & blogs, Spoke with colleagues and peers

Creating complex workflows in an easy way.

Background: Netex Learning focuses on creating smart content platforms with solutions that are full of AI-based features — for example, real-time feedback and digital curriculum. Netex platform also offers personalized cloud platforms with virtual training, conferences, and more.  A part of the development process is to make tools that manage talent detection in an easy way. 

Goals:  There were several goals we sought to achieve with Jenkins. We had the need to increase the quality of the code that is being delivered, and the need to automate different tests (functional, e2e, etc.) There was also the need to automate Docker image generation and do the same for jobs maintaining and deploying in development environments.

"Thanks to Jenkins, I’ve automated many workflows and saved so much time."
image— Javier Méndez Veira, Tech Lead, Netex Learning

Solution & Results: We’ve been using Jenkins for several years, writing multiple pipelines in Groovy that are saved in GitLab with project code. Multiple processes are standardized and able to be automated.  Jenkins executes the jobs and the team receives notifications via chat. This is useful because it saves us a lot of time. We have real-time information and we know the result of each process at the end of the execution. 

Additionally, we can generate Docker images and automatically upload them to the Docker repository without the team having to know the necessary credentials. We also can automate some cron jobs to maintain healthy development environments and deploy either automatically or manually with environment variables parameters for tests of future releases. In short, the most important thing is that we can create complex workflows in an easy way.

Some things we really loved about this Jenkins project! 

  • Pipelines can be written in Groovy. 

  • SSH Agents & Secret Credentials. 

  • Google Chat & Hangouts notifications are really useful for receiving real-time feedback. 

  • The Gitlab plugin.

  • Recovering Groovy configurations.

  • Access to project code. 

  • Webhooks, etc.

Our top four results! 

  1. Build times are 2x faster with Docker images and Jenkins. And deployments are easy!

  2. Standardized QA checks and reporting via chat.

  3. Jenkins helps us automate custom tests. We haven’t needed to extra spend time executing them from our laptops.

  4. We have reduced time spent on maintenance work by automating some processes to be executed on the development machines.