90 days to 10 minutes – How do you like that for efficient software delivery cycles?

We recently talked to one of our customers implementing ElectricCommander, our software development and delivery automation solution, and the improvements this customer has seen with ElectricCommander are truly astounding. The customer (for privacy reasons, we shall not name them here), creates cutting edge software used by millions of web users/consumers around the globe. Their software is written by a large development team–once coded, the software is built, tested and then promoted/deployed to their production data centers. And this process, even for this very sharp engineering team, is quite a tedious one. Building with Maven, running system, performance, and acceptance tests, and packaging for deployment is complex enough; working with these tools, different teams, disparate products and varying skillsets only added to the complexity. The process would take them a week or even months (3 months is what the customer actually calculated on average) to get from development to production. But their business demands and goals are very clear. There is only way to win in the marketplace—iterate and deliver fast. If you need to succeed in today's fast moving market, you need to be more aligned and adaptable to your customer needs. And that’s where Continuous Deployment comes in. The manifesto for Agile development states: "Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter time scale." This is at the core of Agile, because it is only in the act of delivery that we close the loop with the users and initiate feedback. And our customer has taken this notion to heart. Today, the customer has automated their entire process using ElectricCommander. Every one of their development, testing and packaging tool is completely integrated and automated by the ElectricCommander solution. The customer has built workflows that sequence and manages the entire process. As software is written, compiled, tested and deployed to the various environments along the process chain. Tedious manual operations have been eliminated, and errors are detected earlier in the cycle. All this gives the customer good visibility into their software delivery status – what application is in which state of their delivery pipeline. Best of all, the entire process – from development to Ops can be executed in less than 10 minutes ! Now the customer is able to experiment with their software in a way most software organizations can only dream of. And that makes them truly competitive in the marketplace. Just another happy day in the life of an CloudBees customer.