Case Study
Accelerating Software Time-to-Market through Scaled Engineering Excellence
Streamlined deployment, improved testing, enabled joint releases, and reduced complexity
Scaling development with coordinated, governed release processes
A prominent Insurtech, recognized as one of the nation’s largest and fastest-growing personal lines insurance brokers, sought to rapidly expand its custom application development capabilities, transitioning from a small team of developers to an enterprise-scale organization. Valent Partners identified that such growth would introduce new challenges in coordinating and governing software releases across Development, Test, and Production environments. The goal was to establish processes that could manage multiple development teams working on a shared codebase, often operating with different release cadences.
Assessed processes, implemented tools, and improved workflows
- Valent Partners conducted a comprehensive assessment of the Insurtech’s current processes for testing and releasing new features and patches to their production environment.
- To drive buy-in, process flow diagrams were created to illustrate the current state and proposed future state.
- Jira workflows and automations were updated to align with the new SDLC model.
- Valent performed a vendor analysis and selected a Feature Flag and A/B Testing tool, which was subsequently integrated into the codebase.
- Training sessions were held to educate developers, testers, and product managers on the tool’s usage.
- Communication channels and protocols were established to manage scheduled releases and escalated hotfixes effectively.
- CI pipelines were built to create “PR environments,” enabling the QA team to test stories before merging code into a permanent branch.
- Finally, cutover/release plan templates were developed to ensure consistency across releases and provide clear auditability of events.
Streamlined deployment, improved testing, enabled joint releases, and reduced complexity
- Reduced reliance on two key resources for code deployment to production.
- Shifted testing further “left,” allowing issues to be identified earlier in the SDLC.
- Generated SOX audit history for every deployment through cutover templates and communication threads.
- Simplified source control management to reduce complexity.
- Enabled multiple teams to release work collaboratively while maintaining individual timeline flexibility.
- Established standards, calendars, and rotation schedules for hotfixes and planned feature releases.
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