Synergy Accounts Ltd: Accounting and Business Management SoftwareSaved over 30 hours of developer time in the first few days!The very first Pipeline Runner customer tells of their experience and the benefits they received from it almost instantly...

The Problem

Producing a Beta Test release was typically taking up to 10 man hours of labour-intensive work to create, and there were just too many manual changes that had to be made to individual scripts, builds, applications, installers, plus manual uploads to the website all of which dramatically increased the chance of human error… and that was just for one edition!

Enter Pipeline Runner….

Synergy accounts signed up as the very first Pipeline Runner customer selecting the Pro License to give them the full package. Now the entire Beta Release process can be handled with a single click and the developers can get on with more important work whilst waiting for a text or email notification from the Runner. The first script took only minutes to write using plain English commands, but was able to do all this automatically:

• Check to make sure that any prerequisites were available
• Compile the Help content and Manual for the product in CHM, HTML and PDF formats
• Add license management, digital certificates, obfuscation, encyption, and dedicated software protection to the application and over 138 plugin modules and move them to the working output folder
• Automatically modify the installer creation scripts to reflect things like the new version number and copy them to the working script folder
• Build more than a dozen different installers
• Digitally sign each installer
• Zip each installer into its own correctly named file including the version number in the name, and copy to the correct folder for each one
• Check to see if a database update is available, and if so zip that as well giving it an appropriate name again including the version number and copy to the correct folder
• Automatically upload the whole lot to the website securely via SFTP
• Rename and archive the working output directory
• Commit the changes to local Source Control system and upload them to secure central storage
• Clean up and tidy anything left behind as part of the process and leave ready for the next release
• Send an SMS message and / or an email to the relevant staff to confirm success or failure of the pipeline run

The Outcome

Regardless of how much developers are paid, saving 30 hours of paid time in a few days is just amazing in financial terms. It also enabled the company to do more releases with ease if it became necessary, no longer asking customers to wait for a full release. They could now do daily or even hourly releases with ease whereas previously every other week was probably the best they could do.

They said ‘We are amazed at the things we are able to do quickly and easily with this tool – they are pretty much limitless – and already we are looking to compile and test the application automatically, increase dramatically the number of different applications and versions that are released using the tool, and find yet more ways to use it to save time and money’.

‘Using the Pipeline Runner tool has enabled us to devote much more time to development and support, made keeping ahead of the many changes being imposed by Making Tax Digital and other Government initiatives much easier, allowed us to bring more products to market, and saved a lot of money into the bargain. Although we have only been using the product for a short while already we cannot see how we could live without it – and you can quote us on that!’

Since then Pipeline Runner has allowed the Synergy team to add more than twenty extra specialised installers for their Beta program offering dedicated Industry and Vertical Market specific bundles from a single installer, and yet still do everything including updating Source Control and DevOps with just one single click and wait for a text to let them know the outcome. Doing that manually could have taken as much as 100 hours and dramatically increased the risk of human error, yet with Pipeline Runner it runs without errors and takes no more time than before. Perfect!