With CI/CD improvements and shorter release times, J. J. Keller & Associates focuses on creating impactful features using Split Software’s Azure DevOps integration

More than half a million customers rely on Wisconsin-based J. J. Keller & Associates, Inc. for regulatory, safety, and compliance solutions. Its expert insights help create safe work environments and simplify the complexities of regulatory compliance. This privately held, family-owned company’s engineering teams rely on Azure DevOps to plan, collaborate, and remain agile with their release process. 

J. J. Keller enlisted the help of Microsoft Azure Marketplace partner, Split Software, and its Feature Data Platform, to help enable continuous integration and delivery of features that provide the most impact for its customers and business. Split’s Microsoft Azure DevOps integration brings robust feature flagging and targeting to Azure DevOps users for increased visibility across developer teams, agile deployment and development, and granular control of the release process. In addition, customers can power their Azure App Configuration with Split’s experimentation capabilities to truly understand the impact of every feature rolled out.

In early 2021, J. J. Keller started an internal initiative called “Speed-to-Market,” focused on enhancing its Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) processes and methodologies. This initiative centered upon deploying features more often, releasing with confidence and creating improved frameworks for experimentation. 

Accelerating time to market

When J. J. Keller started a journey to “dark releases,” getting solution updates out to customers was a challenging process. At the time, it had a home grown feature toggle management process which was inefficient and difficult to manage. Organizationally J. J. Keller knew it had to increase its speed-to-market to be as competitive as possible. After evaluating several services, J. J. Keller chose Split due to its competitive price, options, service, and integration with Azure Pipelines.  

Improving CI/CD methodologies

It was also imperative to gather customer feedback with each update to use as a guiding compass. To support this effort, J. J. Keller needed to greatly enhance its CI/CD processes and methodologies. Using Microsoft Azure DevOps, coupled with Split, it was able to take deployment frequency down from quarterly to bi-weekly. “Deploying every other week is a milestone on our journey to be able to deploy daily as features are completed. By updating our development processes to use more unit and integration tests, updating our QA processes to bring in more automation, and using Split to allow us to deploy anytime, we greatly increased our confidence in code as it deploys to production,” said Matthew Bingham, Vice President of Software Development at J. J. Keller. 

Creating a culture of experimentation

Looking forward, J. J. Keller plans to run more experiments within their solutions. “Running more feature experiments will be our next major milestone, allowing us to get features out to customers more quickly, and with continuous feedback. Experimentation will enable us to work customers into our development process more efficiently, so we can develop features that drive the most value,” said Bingham.

Microsoft and Split - driving positive business outcomes together

Bi-weekly deployments wouldn’t be possible without smoother deployments. Thanks to Split’s Azure DevOps integration, J. J. Keller’s bi-weekly releases deploy in 30 minutes instead of up to four hours, and with no downtime. J. J. Keller has also created a more efficient development process – creating splits directly from Azure DevOps for improved visibility into the work items assigned to a feature. “We used to have to add steps, putting the split name in the work item or as a tag. Now we have one view, so our team has a good way to see when features can be turned on for a subset of people,” said Bingham.  

With its improved visibility into the development and release process, J. J. Keller’s QA team now understands the full scope of work inside of a feature split, which helps them maintain quality with each release. 

They can also kill any feature instantly if there are any issues.  

“Simply stated, Split’s Azure DevOps integration has simplified our workflow by allowing our developers to create new flags directly in the boards. The linkage between work items and feature flags is a big plus because it streamlines the process of knowing when all work is completed for a single feature, helping us save time, increase our speed-to-market, and ensure a drama-free release,” said Bingham.