Teamforge Orchestrate keeps track of every commit, build, and deployment a team makes and presents a human readable interface.
Lean UI/UX implementation in a Ruby on Rails front end within a strict SCRUM team environment.
The Orchestrate project brings a consumer grade UI to the automated test/deployment process. It’s a tool for admins and managers to monitor and react to the build process.
This was a six month project with a 10+ person team located in Bellvue, WA. I was brought on after the group realized the need for someone to sit between the lead designer, the product owner, and the rest of the engineering team. We would review and plan before he executed designs. Once they passed review I made them into reality.
Teams can create their on “pipelines” which tell the system which steps are involved in a build or deployment.
The big takeaway for me on this project was the process itself. This was a team comprised of mostly Java engineers turned Ruby on Rails. The group ran a very tight form of Agile, unlike Cloudforge which brought me into the company. We ran scheduled nighty deployments along with automated Jenkins builds with every Git push. If you broke the build you knew it within 30 seconds when someone yelled your name from a dark corner. It was a much more transparent and structured environment and it slapped me into shape. I was forced to learn to write tests because I was forced to break tests as I made change requests.
Orchestrator became a plug in for the Teamforge product as opposed to the original plan of being stand alone. That decision really squelched a lot of the ideas that the team had for a really dynamic and current user interface. We ended up with a solid running application.
Each node on the left represents a step in the deployment process. This includes commits, code reviews, build results, etc. There could be anywhere from one to hundreds of steps and the UI has to respond.
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