gtlogic delivers more features in less time with CircleCI

The challenge

To create its highly specialized software solutions for enterprises, gtlogic developers are diligent in adopting technologies and workflows that accelerate agility and improve quality. These technologies and workflows are meticulously matched to developer training that emphasizes efficiency, productivity, and sharpening of the company’s competitive edge.

“We use a continuous iterative approach that focuses on collaboration, customer feedback, and small, rapid releases,” says Rawan Moukalled, Software Engineer at gtlogic. “We also train all team members in a variety of similar and equal skills by switching teams quarterly.”

The end game of gtlogic’s adoption of processes such as CI/CD, and strict attention to skills building, is higher code quality.

“CI/CD reduces integration risk when you have more than one person working on different parts of the process,” Moukalled says. “With everyone using the same process, we make sure everything is integrated seamlessly. Our team members are also no longer slowed down with repetitive activities – automation frees them to focus on what they do best, which is yielding the best end products.”

Even with its attention to code quality and CI/CD development processes, engineers saw opportunities to improve performance, particularly when it came to reducing time for testing. As projects grew in size, the build process became longer: Running the development team’s full suite of tests one time could take as long as two hours.

Even with parallel testing, the process would take 1.5 hours. Since developers had to run tests on local machines, the devices would often be unusable for more work on features during that time.

The solution

To gain time for more feature development and reduce reliance on hardware, gtlogic chose CircleCI as its very first CI/CD development platform.

“We wanted a platform that has support for private repos, good GitHub integration, is easy to use with a great UX and UI, and is customizable according to our team’s needs,” Moukalled says. “CircleCI seemed to be the perfect solution.”

By reducing the time needed for testing, gtlogic developers can push changes to code more frequently. Since developers can run test suites separately on CircleCI, they can continue to work normally on other projects without slowdowns.

In addition, because developers can use multiple containers to parallelize the testing process on CircleCI, the time needed to run test suites has dropped from more than two hours to just 21 minutes on average.

“We made use of CircleCI’s flexible workflow configuration and approval features to be able to selectively run sections of tests related to our changes,” Moukalled says. “This allows us to only run the full test suite when needed, which further reduces the wait time while working on a feature to an average of 12 minutes.”

Improved parallelization is also whittling down the timeframe for tests. “Our processes for deploying features include running all the tests for the project on each commit and before deploying features,” Moukalled says. “It would have been a nightmare to maintain this process manually without running tests automatically on commit pushes to GitHub, or parallelization of tests. The ability to parallelize our tests cut down our process from hours to about 30 minutes.”

“CircleCI significantly increased the productivity of the team to be able to ship more features, more confidently, and in less time.”

Rawan Moukalled
Senior Front End Engineer at gtlogic

How CircleCI powers gtlogic’s business

More features in less time – that’s the simple result that gtlogic developers sought from deploying the CircleCI platform. Given the time savings gained in various parts of the testing process, gtlogic has met this goal.

The company currently uses CircleCI primarily for a health tech client’s project. “We can confidently say that CircleCI has helped us achieve our goals with that project, and consequently our client’s goals in the industry,” Moukalled says. “We’re meeting our deadlines and delivering a good-quality product with robust, reliable, and scalable code.”

Benefits since using CircleCI

• Reduced integration risk
• Automation frees up developer time
• Test suite run time now just 21 minutes
• Parallelization saves hours of test time
  
  

About gtlogic

gtlogic partners with companies who have a proven track record in the market and realize that their product needs a rewrite with optimized user experience and new technology to keep up with the market. gtlogic teams up with staff to implement a low-risk strategy to gradually revamp the solution and eventually replace the legacy product with a new and improved version, ready for aggressive growth.