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Pearson VUE saves time and money by automating code build and deployment
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Infrastructure Inspection
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
The Challenge
Pearson VUE, the world's largest testing organization, was struggling with time-consuming manual release and deployment processes. The process involved dozens of steps and was causing frustration among the development and operations teams due to their inability to move code to production quickly. When a production issue arose, it was difficult to determine whether the code or the deployment was the problem. Given the nature of Pearson VUE's business, reducing production issues was essential. For instance, any problem in production could affect the speed at which a customer could grant a candidate a license to practice medicine.
About The Customer
Pearson VUE is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and delivers millions of high-stakes tests each year for customers in the licensure, certification, academic admissions, regulatory, and government testing marketplaces. As the world’s largest testing organization, Pearson VUE works to stay agile and competitive. The company is constantly trying to innovate and improve its products and services to stay ahead of the competition. The business intelligence (BI) development team at Pearson VUE, led by Guy Speier, senior group manager, plays a crucial role in this process.
The Solution
To address the challenge, Guy Speier and Mark Muellner, senior developer at Pearson VUE, used IBM® UrbanCode™ Deploy software to automate their group’s software deployment processes. The group had made three previous attempts to automate deployment, investing hundreds of hours of work with inadequate results. However, with IBM UrbanCode Deploy software, significant progress was made in just 35 hours. Within three weeks, two out of the three major software components were 95 percent automated. The new solution allowed Muellner to create a schedule to automatically pull code changes from a repository, build them, and then push them to an integration and regression testing environment. The entire process from start to finish was automated, reducing dozens of manual steps to a single step where a developer checks code into the repository.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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