Case Study: Azure/ Azure DevOps Adoption, West Blue Consulting

Customer
West Blue Consulting Accra, Ghana
Industry
Information Technology
Needs Expressed
  • Azure Devops Services
Benefits Realized
  • Reduced infrastructure costs
  • Reduced time to market
  • Reduced software support and maintenance costs
Background

West Blue Consulting is a leading world IT-consulting and technology firm that delivers solutions that transform businesses both in the public and private sectors by making use of information technology methods. West Blue Consulting believes in building solutions that enhance productivity and automating business processes and designing solutions that exceed her client’s requirements. Incorporated in 2012, West Blue Consulting has over 35 Application Software solutions that have satisfied client’s needs.

Problem
One of the challenges faced by West Blue Consulting is the inability of all units involved in the software development lifecycle process to be in sync as the software is being developed. Part of the challenges also is that continuous integrations and continuous deployment (CI/CD) are not in place in the on-premise deployment cycle. Hence, they are considered incorporating this into their development lifecycle.
West Blue Consulting’s commitment to the continuous improvement of her software development operations and to deploy applications faster led her into considering using Azure DevOps.
Objective

The objective is to enable Project Management and Task Monitoring using the Kaban Boards, codebase version control using Azure Repos, and other enhanced features that come with Azure DevOps Services.

Solution

It was recommended to use the full buquet of services from Azure DevOps

Implementation
The migration and setup of projects, teams, CI/CD pipelines, Kanban boards, and other resources took 12 working days; less than the estimated 20. Change management was a key element in the project and all developers and stakeholders were carried along through every phase of planning and implementation. West Blue was happy with the results and is even more committed to modernizing their processes and products using Azure and Azure DevOps
Solution in Action
Azure DevOps has been fully adopted across the entire organisation.
All developers use the code repository features to keep track of their work and facilitate collaboration with one another. Testers/QA personnel use the system to setup Test Cases and Test Plans ensuring every facet of the solutions are kept to the highest standards
Product Managers as well as Executive Management use the Kanban Boards and other Work Item features to stay abreast of project/product status
The infrastructure team works closely with the developers to define their Infrastructure as Code and setup automated release pipelines that allow the developers to get their code into production as quickly as possible in a safe and secure manner agreed ahead of time by Dev and Ops
West Blue Consulting
Inability for all units involved in the software development lifecycle process to be in sync with the software been developed. Also, lack of continuous Integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline for on-prem deployment cycle.
Current structure and workflow:
  • Team Foundation Server (TFS) used for on-prem source control
  • Apps built with .NET 4.x running on IIS in VMs with SQL Server as a datastore
  • Deployment process currently involves manually copying files to client’s environment.

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