EndGame Improves Developer Productivity by 10% With AccuRev in an Agile Environment
AccuRev “lies at the heart of [EndGame’s] entire development process,” and because of its support for Agile development, has changed the way EndGame’s organization builds and deploys software.
- Andrew Butel, CEO and Founder, EndGame
Customer Profile
EndGame, based in Wellington, New Zealand, is a software business development start-up specializing in cloud applications. EndGame designs, plans and builds applications by leveraging skills in rapid productization, business architecture and Software as a Service (SaaS). The organization uses an Agile approach to software development, with regular release cycles, reviews throughout the project, and a high degree of customer collaboration. EndGame believes in order to be the best and achieve optimized production, it is important to use the best tools for development. To find out more about EndGame, visit http://www.end-game.com/.
Background
Andrew Butel, CEO and founder at EndGame, used both Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Subversion (SVN) as software configuration management tools throughout his career as a software developer. As the complexity of projects grew, and more advanced Agile practices and methods were incorporated into development processes, Andrew and his development teams experienced increased pain with both Microsoft Team Foundation System and Subversion. Productivity was reduced as nightly builds broke, and entire teams were focused on finding the issues and fixing these builds. As a result, monthly release cycles were rarely completed on time.
After experiencing such pain with tools that did not properly support Agile environments, Andrew wanted his start-up, EndGame, to be genuinely Agile. In order to work towards implementing an optimal software development process Andrew knew he needed more than Agile ideals, he needed Agile tools- tools that are designed to solve tough problems such as branching and merging, all while performing in a controlled and scalable environment.
Support For Agile
AccuRev was implemented at EndGame from the start. AccuRev “lies at the heart of EndGame’s entire development process,” and because of its support for Agile development, has changed the way EndGame’s organization builds and deploys software.
EndGame operates as a customer-driven organization, while AccuRev allows for its teams to meet specific market requirements. Regular release cycles occur monthly, with two to five updates each release. AccuRev allows for developers at EndGame to fix customer issues and send them live with confidence, without having to wait for the next release. Bugs that may take a day or less to fix are easily repaired and sent live to customer sites, because of AccuRev’s streamlined release process.
“With other tools, sending individual issues live isn’t an option. It could take one person up to 3 months to fix a bug and release it. Our customers greatly value these collaboration efforts, and we are completely confident in AccuRev when rolling fixes live.”
– Andrew Butel, CEO and Founder, EndGame
AccuRev Streams also give the team confidence in deploying to sites within the development environment. The EndGame development model follows a “production > release candidate > stage [QA, Test, Review] > development” environment stream,
and users are able to deploy to testing upwards of 20 times per day. Previous tools only allowed for just one deployment a day, but because of AccuRev Streams, developers do not have to wait to test an entire branch at once.
“Deploying to sites is at least 10 times faster with AccuRev. Streams are where AccuRev really stands out- issues can be drag-and-dropped to the production site easily, ready for deployment.”
Merging branches had been a source of pain in the past that greatly impacted developer productivity. Too much time was spent on branch maintenance, and merges became day-long events that often tied up whole development teams and resulted in broken builds. AccuRev’s branching and merging system has saved EndGame a great amount of time and frustration, freeing up 10 percent of development time.
With automatic deployment and support for continuous integration, “QA can pull from the team, instead of the team pushing code to QA.”
To read more about EndGame’s experience with AccuRev, visit: http://businesssavvysoftware.com/2010/11/03/scm-with-accurev/
