Optimal Workshop is a software as a service company based in Wellington, New Zealand. They make usability study tools that help user experience designers, information architects and usability researchers in 106 countries improve the UX of their websites and products. Optimal Workshop’s tools are used by teams at Google, Dropbox, the BBC and NASA, to name a few. Their usability testing tools provide useful quantitative data, as well as assistance with analyzing this data.
Industry: Software development
Stack: Ruby, Ruby on Rails
The Challenge
Optimal Workshop has a team of 10 developers using Ruby on Rails to develop usability measuring tools. They have been doing continuous integration ever since they started developing their first application. In the beginning, they used Java and TeamCity as their CI solution. Five years ago, the team made a decision that the Java framework they were using just wasn’t the right fit for what the company was trying to achieve.
After some investigation, they decided to rewrite their suite of applications in Ruby, with Ruby on Rails as the web framework. In order to further optimize their workflow, they also decided to look for a reliable continuous integration and deployment solution. Their current solution, Team City, was self-hosted, which meant that the team was wasting hours upon hours on configuring and maintaining CI servers. This took valuable time away from developing and improving their products.
The Solution
After comprehensive research, a decision was made. The best solution would be to switch to a hosted CI solution that is easy to configure, and that would allow them to simply pay a monthly fee and not have to maintain the servers themselves.
While investigating all the hosted CI solutions they could find, the team tested Semaphore. They quickly found that Semaphore was a perfect fit that met all of their needs. What won the team over was the ease with which they could set up CI for all their projects on Semaphore. They were also very happy with Semaphore’s performance, which was far better than that of other hosted continuous integration and deployment solutions.
The ability to run tests in parallel is what the Optimal Workshop team finds most helpful, and it’s the feature they use the most. With Semaphore in place, each of their builds has 16 jobs available to run them in parallel. Having such parallel testing capability saves an hour of waiting time for each build, and it has been a long time since the team has run the entire test suite from start to end on their development environments. Optimal Workshop developers rely on Semaphore to take care of running all of their tests.
In addition to using Semaphore for continuous integration, the team has also configured automatic deployment to staging and production servers, which is triggered as soon as a build passes on a preconfigured branch.
The Results
The team is looking at removing the production branch at some stage, so that as soon as something is merged to master and it passes in CI, it will be automatically deployed to Cloud 66. Connecting Semaphore to Cloud 66 is simple, since Semaphore provides an integration that allows users to set up automatic deployment in a few clicks. It’s also more convenient than going into Cloud 66 manually every time and clicking “Deploy” and faster than doing a deploy manually out of Semaphore. Automatic deployments can be easily disabled and re-enabled, which is a very useful feature for the team.
