DiUS Computing considers innovation to be critical to maintaining its technology edge. As part of our drive to foster and stimulate innovation, in June 2012 we created the DiUS Innovation Challenge, a competition to achieve an ambitious objective within a set timeframe to win a cash prize.
The first DiUS Innovation Challenge was “Zeroing Iteration Zero”, where the objective was to reduce the time required to set up a project’s environments from a number of days to two hours. The competition was open to all DiUS Employees and teams were given two months to solve the challenge.
Iteration Zero is the initial phase of an agile software development project in which the project environment is prepared for development and testing of the application. It includes setting up the code repository in which the team will manage the source code, setting up the environments in which to test the system, and a build pipeline that automatically handles tests when new source code is committed and pushes a new version out to the test environment and stakeholders or beta testers when it passes the automated tests. It can also include setting up a project dashboard that shows at a glance the team’s velocity, a burn up/down chart, and the health of the environments and the build.
Teams needed to set up within 2 hours a full set of elastic environments for an application based on a Rails, Grails, or Java tech stack, with a Continuous Integration/Deployment (CI/CD) build pipeline and project dashboard.
We’re pleased to announce that three teams achieved the objective. All three entries will be open-sourced. DiUS now intends to combine the best features from all three entries, and make use of the product to save setup time on future projects, saving our clients’ time and delivering business features sooner.