Custom Java-based Release Management Plug-in for a MMO Gaming Vendor

iOS mobile client to stock monitoring web service
Configurable stop triggers and templates
Notifications and alerts

Expertise

Business Process Automation

Verticals

Media & Entertainment

Technologies

Java

Database

Frontend

By delivering a release management plug-in, Iflexion helped a world-known online games publisher to upgrade their updates delivery workflows.

Duration

Months

Efforts

Person-months

Context
Solution
Results

Context

Our Customer is an online game developer and publisher that has established its position as a market leader within the free-to-play MMO market. Due to the specific business demands of the company, the Customer constantly has to manage new releases of games as well as web services. The Head of DevOps department came to a conclusion, that it was necessary to automate the whole cycle of release management from creating, editing to filling and implementing games and web-services releases. With a view to manage all release tasks, the Customer’s company required developing a custom tool that would be easy and convenient to use for all the employees involved in the process.

Challenge

The Customer’s company has offices in 10 countries scattered around the world. The main difficulty in release management lied in organizing communication between all the involved parties around the world. New releases demand constant collaboration and timely notifications for the right team members both on request and automatically (on event/on schedule); writing long emails with a huge address list was no longer an option.

New gaming and web services releases occur approximately once in 2 weeks within the Customer’s company, and involve up to 400 employees. All in all, there were two main problems that required prompt solution:

Need for release management automation for both gaming and web services with a custom form to create /edit release-related tasks
Necessity to arrange the communication and notification process between geographically scattered teams

Solution

Iflexion Customer Support engineers have developed and implemented a Java-based plug-in to automate the full cycle of release creation, management and control, as well as a custom tool integrated with 3rd party data storage for collecting addresses and sending out standard and custom notifications according to the predefined rules.

The solution automates the following business processes:

Managing release tasks and subtasks
Sending notifications to the relevant parties about planned or current releases
Planning the releases
Monitoring the tasks resolution.

The solution provides for the following user roles:

Results

Our team provided the Customer with a custom tool that automates the full cycle of gaming and web services release management. Iflexion team has also created a complex business logic that allows creating customized emails in tune with the information that release tasks contain, set up the process of receivers list formation and the rules for sending letters by specific rules.

Currently the solution is implemented and successfully used within the Customer’s company. The Customer abandoned all other release management practices, as the developed solution has proven to be far more effective.