Developing applications quickly that exceed our customer’s needs is one of the goals that we have in MIS. To accomplish this, we take advantage of several tools that help us organize our work, prioritize tasks, test for defects, and deploy our code.
We use Atlassian JIRA to help us organize and prioritize our work. JIRA allows us to create issues, which we then use to organize tasks to be completed for a project. These issues can be assigned our to our team and prioritized to make sure we meet deadlines. We also use these issues to track what has been done and what needs to be done for a project.
Atlassian Stash is a Git repository manager which tracks all of our source code changes and allows us to collaborate on a project. Stash gives us a workflow where changes to code can be reviewed before being merged to ensure that only the highest quality changes make it out the door. It also provides an interface to JIRA so that we can link code changes to issues and update those issues when the work is complete.
We also use Jenkins, a continuous integration server, to run a series of automated tasks against our work. Any change that is made in Stash triggers Jenkins to run a suite of tests against those changes. These tests check various functions to help ensure that the change did not break any of the basic processes of the application. It also analyzes the code to make sure it meets our coding standards. We’ve tried to standardize how we write code to make it easier to read what others have written. Once changes have been marked as ready for testing, Jenkins will automatically build the application and deploy it to our test servers. This allows us to keep working on the next set of changes without having to worry about the process of manually building and deploying our applications.
These are just a few of the changes to our development workflow that we’ve been working on to help improve the efficiency of our team. We’re always on the lookout for ways improve and provide the highest quality service to the University.
Written by Jeff Thomas, Analyst MIS Administrative and Financial Team
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