Issue: The client was facing a tremendeous loss in productivity due to the lack of automation -- tests were carried out by hand, software packaged and shipped with various scripts which only a few people were able to correctly execute. The production system was in an unmaintainable state, as no one really knew what exactly was lately altered by whom.

Solution: As the project was already hosted in a GitLab repository, we firstly developed a pipeline. Easily, we were able to automize code linting, unit tests, setting up test systems in order to carry out integrational tests, packaging and providing these packages. In a next step, we developed a test-harness where the team could easily integrate tests on various levels, e.g. unit tests written by developers as well as end-to-end tests by consultants.

Furthermore, we carefully started to carry out the deployment process and administration of systems using Ansible in order to make deployments accessible, less error prone and have a single point of truth of the state of the system.

In a next step, we also incorporated the Ansible deployment into the CI-/CD-pipeline, such that the customer was able to roll out new versions with a single click.

The team is now in a position to get releases out more quickly. At the same time, due to test automation it is more confident of the quality and correctnes of the product. Furthermore, due to automation more resources are available to work on tasks that really matter.