Case study
New DevOps ecosystem reduced manual processes by 90% for an American weather forecasting company
OUR CLIENT
This company was founded several decades ago. Its weather reporting programming is a staple in the homes and businesses of hundreds of thousands of viewers internationally every day. In recent years, the company’s services have expanded to include niche documentaries and entertainment programming that complement its popular website and mobile apps.
THE CHALLENGE
Weather information company needed technology partner to bolster DevOps ecosystem
The client needed a technology partner with extensive DevOps and CI/CD expertise to help its development team shift from a waterfall to an agile software engineering approach. Specifically, the company needed help to:
- Streamline functional smoke and regression tests for iOS and Android operating systems to ensure applications run seamlessly on multiple platforms.
- Deploy a continuous API data validation process on Jenkins.
- Regression test the company’s entire flagship application.
- Ensure data privacy measures comply with standard regulations, like General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) , California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) , and Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD) .
THE TRANSFORMATION
DevOps experts modernized the development approach, assessed website and mobile apps for QA issues
UST helped the company’s internal software engineers transition from a legacy, linear waterfall development approach to a modern, iterative DevOps application development mode. Once the DevOps ecosystem was in place, the team automated the development pipelines of the client’s website and flagship apps for both iOS and Android devices. The team introduced best practice governance policies by implementing a release readiness checklist, planning and tracking strategies, a requirements traceability model, and a decision analysis and resolution paradigm to evaluate potential DevOps and CI/CD tools. To streamline processes, the project team implemented quality assurance (QA) automations for critical business functions, including GDPR compliance, locale and map configurations, features administration, and advertising management. The team also conducted a series of in-depth QA analyses to identify website and app performance issues, including:
- End-to-end functional and regression tests - across the company’s web and mobile applications.
- Response time tests for every web page on the company’s website - using WebPageTest.
- API tests to validate data across all of the company’s applications - using Charles and Postman.
- Device performance tests - using Trepn Profiler as well as automated test scripts for several custom network calls.
- Manual testing - for iOS & Android flagship apps, WU, and Storm apps
THE IMPACT
New DevOps ecosystem reduced manual processes by 90%
With the new continuous development ecosystem in place, the software engineering team at this American weather forecasting company achieved these benefits:
- Significantly boosted productivity - by replacing 90% of manual processes with automations.
- Reduced QA cycle times by 60% - by automating smoke tests for native apps.
- Automated localization testing - for more than 20 languages.
- Embedded data privacy protocols - Over 7 applications were tested for GDPR, CCPA, and LGPD across localized languages, to ensure compliance.
- Introduced Android lite app - to attract users in regions of the world with lower network bandwidth.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/productengineering
https://www.ust.com/en/ust-product-engineering/softwareproductengineering
https://www.ust.com/en/industries/tmt