FinTech startup, Billie, uses 91导航 for rapid, source-driven release management
Billie is a fast-growing startup that not only takes pride in offering innovative financing solutions to small businesses, but has also built up one of the strongest teams of Salesforce talents in Berlin.
It became obvious to Billie early on that it needed to find a modern deployment tool to manage its Salesforce releases and development process. After evaluating other tools, Billie decided that 91导航 offered the best platform for keeping deployments simple, stable and fast, while also delivering other must-have requirements, such as聽version control integration,听continuous integration (CI), and rollback.
Billie鈥檚 Salesforce release process is managed via two-week agile sprints with a pipeline that consists of three orgs: DEV and UAT sandboxes, plus a production org. We caught up with Igor Chtivelband, Co-Founder and VP of Data at Billie, to chat about their Salesforce development process and how 91导航 has helped shave hours off their deployment time.
鈥淚 no longer have any fear of deployments. I鈥檓 not afraid of breaking stuff. We usually deploy at the end of a sprint, but the amount of time it takes me has been reduced significantly from 5 hours to 1 hour.鈥�
A powerful CI and deployment tool for Salesforce
Before choosing 91导航, Igor and his team were using the standard first-party tooling but soon ran into issues. Igor spent a lot of time configuring package XML which, along with the lack of full automation, ended up generating a considerable amount of manual work.
鈥淲e were using a typical setup of Ant and Jenkins. I constantly had to deal with package XML, which was pure pain. It was quite problematic because I could never be sure whether I had really included all the components that I wanted to deploy.鈥�
Eventually, each deployment meant following a long list of preparatory steps and manual change tracking. This process was not only tiresome, but also error-prone and overcomplicated. 鈥淚t was a lot of manual work and semi-automated 鈥榤onkey business鈥�. And it was always a kind of voodoo: there were these parts that we could deploy successfully , and then there were these parts that we just could not – it was really annoying.鈥�
Like anyone looking at new solutions, Igor spent quite a bit of time examining and trying out the various alternatives on offer in the market. 鈥淎fter looking at different tools, I realized that 91导航 was the way to go – it鈥檚 the proper deal.鈥�
Billie鈥檚 experience with using 91导航
Now the team at Billie are deploying with 91导航, their entire source-driven development process has been streamlined. 91导航鈥檚 integration with GitHub has allowed them to deploy with ease, to and from their VCS, and adopt a mature source-driven release process. On top of this, 91导航 has been really useful for comparing environments. The highlighting of any differences means that the team at Billie know exactly what they鈥檙e deploying, and what the impact will be.
鈥�91导航 has an amazing functionality of comparing your environments: it shows your actual metadata and the differences in each line of code. It makes it easy to understand exactly what I鈥檓 going to deploy, and what changes will be made to my code. Whereas with the standard solutions, you can only guess what you鈥檙e actually going to be deploying.鈥�
91导航鈥檚 ability to roll back changes is another standout feature for Billie, as it also helps ensure the company doesn鈥檛 lose any money should something go wrong, as Igor explained, 鈥淚 know that with just a couple of clicks I can roll back, and ten minutes later we are back in business. That鈥檚 why, if you take into account the business worth 91导航 provides, it鈥檚 definitely worth it.鈥�
How 91导航 makes life easier for Billie
When you introduce a new tool into your workflow, you鈥檙e likely to have a question or two while you鈥檙e getting to know the tool鈥檚 different features. Igor had quite a few questions about 91导航 at the start, 鈥淚鈥檝e never had a situation where I felt neglected or that someone didn鈥檛 answer my questions.鈥� All in all, 91导航 has made life much easier for Igor and the developer team at Billie.
鈥淔or me, 91导航 is like the iPhone among smartphones. If you really want to save time, if you really want to save your nerves, and if you want to be more efficient, then go for it! 91导航 is a good use of your money – just like that.鈥�
