How PolicyMe saves 12 hours of development time per week with CircleCI
By increasing deployments and pipeline speed, the Toronto insurance provider accelerates product innovation
Buying insurance is famously complicated and messy. PolicyMe uncomplicates the task of buying life insurance or critical illness insurance for the Canadian market.
“We’ve cut unnecessary steps and expenses to offer Canadians the most affordable product in Canada, with the same quality of coverage,” explains Vipul Srivastava, Software Engineering Manager at PolicyMe. “People can apply online and get a decision in minutes, not weeks.”
To keep pace with customer needs and successfully connect people to insurers, Srivastava’s team needed a solution that ensured they could maintain a highly reliable application, while at the same time allowing them to iterate quickly and release new features to maintain their market position.
Boosting engineering confidence
PolicyMe developers were originally using Travis CI for CI/CD, but the development team used a forking model that Travis didn’t support. When he went searching for a solution for his team, Srivastava discovered that CircleCI provided contexts for securing and sharing environment variables across projects, which he realized would unblock the team and allow them to run pipelines and automations on all their forked PRs. He decided to make the move.
“Switching from TravisCI to CircleCI really gave us the juice that we needed to push software much faster and boost the confidence of our engineering teams,” Srivastava says.
Moving faster while reducing errors
The PolicyMe team aims to keep their pipelines green as much as possible, so they’re confident that all changes they make are good.
To maintain this high bar, they leverage CircleCI orbs (shareable configuration packages) to automate efficiency and quality. “Orbs gives us global configurations and enable us to add a host of automations to our pipeline, saving even more development time,” Srivastava says.
The team has created dedicated config for common use cases such as web applications, as well as custom Python and npm libraries. All their pipelines automatically run a robust test suite and then integrate seamlessly with Slack, GitHub, and Jira. This gives Srivastava’s team both fast feedback and the ability to quickly debug failures when they happen. This robust testing keeps their pipelines green and bolsters the team’s confidence in their code quality.
“CircleCI enables us to push software faster, reduce errors, and save more development time,” Srivastava says.
“CircleCI is the backbone of our software development lifecycle, since it allows us to push software faster, test things faster, and keep iterating.”
Vipul Srivastava
Software Engineering Manager at PolicyMe
Secure by design
CircleCI has become a valuable ally in the realm of application security. The PolicyMe engineering team recently added static analysis tooling directly to their pipelines, which helps inform developers immediately about potential vulnerabilities, allowing them to patch them quickly and minimize or avoid customer impact. They also rely on scheduled jobs to ensure their custom orbs remain up to date.
The backbone of software development
CircleCI is now at the heart of PolicyMe’s CI/CD. “It’s the backbone of our software development lifecycle, since it allows us to push software faster, test things faster, and enables us to keep iterating on feedback [so we can] rapidly develop a new, in-house insurance product,” says Srivastava. “When we’re able to iterate faster, we improve our customer satisfaction.”
Benefits of using CircleCI:
- Accelerating code testing, iterations, and releases
- Sharable configuration allows scaling while maintaining consistent standards
- Supporting development of new products via rapid feedback cycles
About PolicyMe
PolicyMe is a digital life insurance solution built to make financial protection for families easy and affordable. PolicyMe has sold billions in coverage to date and focuses on reducing cost by eliminating operational inefficiencies. Their technology platform is built with a customer-first approach and aims to simplify the process of buying insurance.