OTHER CASE STUDIES:
Rezare Systems
Rezare Systems’ mission is to help the primary sector become more productive, sustainable, and profitable.
Industry: Agriculture, Software, Information Technology, Agriculture Software
Location: Waikato Innovation Park, Hamilton, New Zealand
Rezare enjoys exponential growth in automation with BuildMaster; invigorates their clients.
Rezare works with scientists, agricultural consultants and information providers to understand the needs of farmers and their advisors, and the issues that affect their adoption of new technology; Create data collection systems and databases that efficiently collect and manage large amounts of data, Deliver sophisticated analyses, including use of mathematical models of biological systems that allows decision makers to visualize the impact of farm decisions on profit and the environment.
Their customers include corporate farmers, primary processing companies, service providers or advisors, and sector organizations.
As of July 2016, Rezare has been using BuildMaster for close to 3 years. With this level of experience with BuildMaster they’ve not only been able to solve their original challenge, but with the aid of the software delivery processes, and ecosystem they’ve created along the way, moved on to solving new challenges and making unpredicted process improvements.
The Challenge:
For years, Rezare Systems, like most software organizations coming of age in this era, had to manually deploy their software. This involved copy/pasting files, resolving dependencies, manually database management, etc. It was unruly, error-prone, and frustrating. During this era they had attempted to use Visual Studio’s “one click publish” but unfortunately it did not work at all, and broke everything it touched. From there, the Rezare team looked into popular tools including Team City, Jenkins, and BuildMaster for a solution.
While TeamCity and Jenkins seemed like they would take far longer to integrate, learn, and accomplish what was needed, BuildMaster proved to be the easiest to use and best-suited for that particular task. Investing in licenses was an easy decision.
The Solution:
The growth-path for use of BuildMaster/BuildMaster integration should be interesting to a new BuildMaster user, and familiar to an experienced user: The recommended “pilot” run with their newly purchased licenses ran about 6 months and involved 2 applications, expanded to 5 by the end of the first year…and with the tracks laid out mushroomed to 126 between years 1 and 3. Each application, of course, is different with its own requirements. Rezare has automated the delivery of all of its applications this way.
“The benefit aside from the development aspect of automation, was for customers” according to Daniel Buchanan, developer. “They had confidence that when we said we were going to release a build for them, that it wasn’t going to break, we knew exactly what was going to happen, and if something failed, we knew exactly what failed and how to fix it. All of this lead to greater increase in confidence, which then lead to deciding that we can release to production far more often and thus, more innovation is occurring.”
Overall Results:
After achieving their primary goal, Rezare has been able to enjoy another key benefits from using BuildMaster: package management integration with NuGet.
Use of BuildMaster has further empowered Rezare have their our own NuGet repository with 20-25 NuGet packages built and deployed using BuildMaster. After making changes to a project and its library, releasing it as a package, and eventually to production, this makes for an easy method of exposing libraries to clients. Clients benefit from the fact that it is easy for them to consume these packages, getting the newest version through NuGet in a similar fashion to how they receive other updates, despite Rezare maintaining the packages and keeping them up to date for clients. It’s an added convenience as a service provider, and clients have responded very positively to it, especially overseas clients.
In conclusion, the key benefit of using BuildMaster is simply confidence: confidence to edit, update, build, and deploy far more easily and securely.
Finally, “Linux integration and support is critical. We’d really be lost without it. If we didn’t have BuildMaster, we’d need something else to take its place. I took a good long look at other tools and none of them were as good, so we’re very fortunate.”
