Release management plug-in for Wargaming
Itransition developed a custom Java-based release management plug-in for one of the leaders in the free-to-play MMO market
Problem
Customer
Our Customer is an award-winning online game developer and publisher and one of the leaders in the free-to-play MMO market across PC, console, and mobile. Founded as a privately held company in 1998, Wargaming has shipped more than 15 titles and employs over 4,000 professionals across key regions such as North America, Europe, Russia, Asia and Australia.
Due to the specific business demands of the company, the Customer constantly has to manage new releases of games as well as web services. The Head of DevOps department came to a conclusion that it was necessary to automate the whole cycle of release management. With a view to managing all release tasks, the Customer turned to Itransition for DevOps services in order to develop a custom tool that would be easy and convenient to use for all the employees involved in the process.
Objective
The Customer’s company has offices in many countries scattered around the world. The main difficulty in release management lied in organizing communication between all the involved parties around the world. New releases demand constant collaboration and timely notifications for the right team members both on request and automatically (on event/on schedule); writing long emails with a huge address list was no longer an option.
New games-related web services releases occur frequently within the Customer’s company, and involve big number of employees across different departments and countries. All in all, there were two main problems that required prompt solution:
- Need for release management automation web services with a custom form to create /edit release-related tasks.
- Necessity to arrange the communication and notification process between geographically scattered teams.
Solution
Itransition Customer Support engineers have developed and implemented a Java-based plug-in to automate the full cycle of release creation, management, and control, as well as a custom tool integrated with 3rd party data storage for collecting addresses and sending out standard and custom notifications according to the predefined rules.
The delivered solution automates the following business processes:
- Managing release tasks and subtasks;
- Sending notifications to the relevant parties about planned or current releases;
- Planning the releases;
- Monitoring the tasks resolution.
The solution provides for the following user roles:
Process
Itransition team was involved in the following stages of the solution development:
As a result of the requirements analysis and specification, our team has provided the Customer with a custom tool that automates the full cycle of gaming and web services release management. Itransition team has also created a complex business logic that allows creating customized emails in tune with the information that release tasks contain, set up the process of receivers list formation and the rules for sending letters by specific rules.
Currently the solution is implemented and successfully used within the Customer’s company. The Customer abandoned all other release management practices as the developed solution has proven to be far more effective.
