Dockbit
Tool to automate and manage complex software deployments. Deploy with single command. Project pipelines performs the steps of a deployment, supervises each tool action, monitors and notifies of status, halts if there are problems. Analyzes and reports on result.
Folia - Growing Startup
Situation
Folia is a small startup. It is growing fast. New people are joining the company every week, and scrambling to cover all the work to be done. Their core product is developing and being refined as they gain traction and more feedback. From experience they know that even though they are moving fast, they still want to follow good practices and keep their process tidy. Already their deployment process involves several steps, and it is distracting to keep teaching the details to each new technical person that joins.
Vision
Folia adopts Dockbit early, even though their process is still relatively simple. As the process grows and changes each week, nice that it is centralized in Dockbit. No need to worry if everyone is up to date on the latest changes. New team members can study the Dockbit pipeline as a guide during their onboarding.
Insights
In the chaos of a rapidly growing small company, having disciplined processes increases flexibility of who can work on what, and reduces dependencies on single individuals.
Having a transparent, regularized form for the deployment process reduces issues of keeping everyone up to date with changes.
Having a structured deployment process makes it easier to orient new team members, allowing them to quickly see the high level and then push into the details as needed.
Experienced people know that following good process practices pay off quickly and should be implemented early when possible.
Milu - Legacy Migration
Situation
Milu is a medium sized company with two main products. They have been around for 10 years and have a lot of legacy code and processes. Their deployment process is cumbersome, fragile, requires a lot of time and resources. Dependent on knowledge in the heads of a few key personnel. Team comes in over a weekend to do a release when the office is quiet.
Milu’s products are evolving to become more cloud based, and management would like to move to a flexible and frequent deployment process. Not sure how to chart a path though, from their legacy practices to a more modern setup.
Vision
A consultant Franz from Delatouch working at Milu suggested they consider migrating deployment to Dockbit. Franz has seen it working well for other clients. The reaction at Milu was mixed. Devs at Milu made a few small test projects on Dockbit, and reacted favorably. But fear and uncertainty remained about migrating Milu’s real products. Some however advocated strongly that the current path was untenable, and would only get worse if nothing was done.
A project manager at Milu checked out partners of Dockbit on their site, and learned of Sedep, a company that specializes in migrating legacy processes to modern tools. Milu brought in Sedep for an initial assessment period, and eventually decided to move forward with Dockbit with Sedep’s assistance. The migration was a bit bumpy, but with Sedep’s guidance, Milu successfully moved to Dockit in 3 months.
Insights
Companies with legacy code and processes may need help from experts to migrate to a new system like Dockbit.
Initial reactions to change are naturally fearful and uncertain. But resulting benefits may (and should) outweigh the costs.
Efficient for Dockbit to partner with verified providers for services such as legacy migration. Allows each to focus on their core business.
Sirius - Agency
Situation
Sirius is a software agency, building applications for diverse clients. For each project Sirius builds a custom process to allow customers to deploy new releases. Even though Sirius has standard templates, the cost of doing a custom solution adds to the final cost of the product. Sirius is conflicted, because they would like to include additional features such as notifications and reporting that help their clients, but also wish to keep development costs down.
Vision
Sirius replaced their templates and custom deployment processes with Dockbit. Dockbit handles the high level part of the deployment process in a standardized way, so for each client project Sirius only has to implement truly custom parts of the various steps. Further, Dockbit is featureful to a degree that Sirius would never have pursued, giving Sirius’ customers nice extensions like notifications and reporting, and even deploying from commands in Slack.
Insights
Agencies can give more value faster and for less cost by integrating external provider solutions the elegantly and robustly solve general problems.
Using provider solutions for general parts of problems allows agencies to focus on their core abilities – attacking the difficult, unique parts of problems.
A standard provider like Dockbit is able to amortize the development cost of “nice to have” features across its many customers, providing more value for less cost than customers would get from custom solutions.