The Client
ESP Solutions Group (ESP) helps state and local education and other government agencies to design, build, and improve decision support systems. One of their services is to implement the Ed-Fi Powered Dashboards, which provides educators access to historical, timely, and predictive information on all students. Educators can use Ed-Fi Powered Dashboards to help manage academic performance and address the needs of students throughout the year.
“As a relible custom web application development company, Simpat provided the technical leadership needed to put in place a modern development process that has let us focus on where we add true value and stay away from the things that don’t. We truly value Simpat’s commitment to our success.”
The Challenges
ESP needed a development and operations process (DevOps) for enhancing the Ed-Fi Powered Dashboards product for a statewide implementation in Wyoming. The process had the following requirements:
- Automation: Minimize manual intervention by software developers
- One-click deployment: Simplify the process of releasing the software to users
- Continuous integration: Allow frequent code check-ins so the software is continuously verified and problems are detected early
- Local testing: Allow developers to test their features in development environments and environments located at the client site
- Timing options: Schedule nightly data processing runs
The Solution
Simpat Solutions partnered with ESP to create a DevOps process that empowers developers, manages risk, and accelerates project velocity. Our team created a continuous integration system using low-cost tools. Now, ESP developers can manage features and bug fixes in an isolated environment and push code to a repository that automatically kicks off a build for testing in minutes. Features and bug fixes only move to the master repository once testing is complete.
The Results
After Simpat Solutions streamlined the development process, ESP has seen many benefits, such as the following:
- Decreased bugs in the code (Only one bug introduced in two release cycles.)
- Quicker software deployment times of 30 to 60 minutes
- Simplified process for removing features from the software that takes only minutes