CODING x Baiguoyuan, the leading fruit retailer takes the first step in the development of the DevOps system

Baiguoyuan (full name Shenzhen Baiguoyuan Industrial (Group) Co., Ltd.), established in Shenzhen in 2001, is a company that integrates fruit procurement, planting support, post-harvest preservation, logistics and warehousing, standard grading, marketing development, brand operation, store retail, A large-scale chain enterprise integrating information technology, financial capital, scientific research and education.

As of September 2021, 200 at home and abroad with multiple special supply bases, with more than 5000 stores, and stationed in 90 across the country. The download volume of APP exceeded 161bc5faf7ab5f 15 million , the number of registered mini-programs exceeded 40 million , and the number of integrated members exceeded 80 million . After a full 20 years of brand management, the "single-minded to make fruit" of chain enterprises has built a warehouse network systems integration shop at the largest online and offline retail chains in fresh, continuous 6 years to enter China Chain Top 100 companies.

Under the digital new retail format, the bottleneck of the non-integrated R&D management system is highlighted

With the advancement of the online/offline integration strategy, Baiguoyuan has created an exclusive sales, finance, transaction, supply chain, marketing service, standardized planting, and data analysis platform to realize the integration of people, goods, and fields through intelligence and digitalization. Structural adjustments and upgrades. While business demand has soared and the number of users has soared, the number of projects has increased year by year. This has also escalated the difficulty of multi-platform, multi-project standardized management, and the bottleneck of the non-integrated R&D management system has become prominent.

Problem 1: R&D tools and data are scattered and fragmented, and management and maintenance costs are high

Before meeting CODING, Baiguoyuan used different systems to manage project matters, manage code, and accumulate team knowledge. Non-integrated R&D management tools have drawbacks, and it is difficult to support the growing demand for multi-channel retail business under the innovative digital retail format of Pagoda.

• Due to the scattered management tools, the account and authority management system is not unified, tool management is difficult; members need to switch back and forth between different platforms, and the research and development efficiency is low.
• The data fragmentation between the tools makes it difficult to realize the correlation between the code and the project requirements. To achieve data connectivity between various tools, additional R&D costs are also required.
• Multiple tools are maintained separately, which is difficult and costly to maintain.

Problem 2: The self-developed system and the project management platform are hindered in docking, and there is a lack of local technical support

The measurement audit system developed by Baiguoyuan is mainly used to measure the progress of iterations and specific tasks within the project, so that managers can evaluate the development of various business lines. To achieve this goal, the measurement audit system needs to interface with the project management platform to obtain the required project data.

However, because the Open API of the project management platform used by Pagoda does not match well with the self-developed system, there are difficulties in connecting the two, and customized development is required. In addition, the project management platform used by Baiguoyuan was provided by a foreign manufacturer, who lacked domestic technical support capabilities. How to quickly implement tool docking for actual business scenarios requires effective local consulting services and technical support for Baiguoyuan, otherwise it can only explore on its own, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive.

"Three-step" strategy, CODING helps Baiguoyuan build an integrated R&D management system

Baiguoyuan hopes to migrate the existing data scattered in various tools to a one-stop R&D management tool, and build a unified office and collaboration platform within the enterprise to meet the needs of multi-project and multi-system R&D management under the digital new retail format. After multiple rounds of technical evaluation and communication, Baiguoyuan finally chose CODING DevOps as the unified R&D management platform. The reasons why Baiguoyuan chose CODING DevOps are:

1. Flexible project items and workflow configuration : Benchmarking with mainstream project collaboration products (such as Jira) in the industry, providing a wealth of item types, attributes and status configurations, and supporting customization of workflows suitable for teams. This also allows Baiguoyuan to use the existing project collaboration methods on the CODING DevOps platform without additional adjustments.
2. powerful one-stop R&D management capabilities : Provide full-process collaboration and R&D tool support from requirements to design, development, construction, testing, release to deployment, and realize one-stop R&D process management.
3. Professional technical support : Provide 7x24 hours of online technical consultation and professional training services, customized development by a dedicated R&D team. For the seamless data migration service required for tool switching and self-developed system connection problems after migration, the coding technical team provides comprehensive support.

In order to smoothly cooperate with Baiguoyuan to move towards the construction of an integrated DevOps system, CODING adopted a "three-step" strategy and implemented the solution step by step.

The first step: sort out the business process and customize the team collaboration workflow

Because it needs to follow the existing project collaboration process and mode, the technical support team of CODING first sorted out the demand flow process of Baiguoyuan. CODING DevOps integrates the whole process of Pagoda from requirements review, product design, development, testing to release verification, ensuring that each functional team can carry out more transparent and agile collaboration activities around product requirements.

With the help of CODING, Baiguoyuan has determined the workflow of "demand" circulation within the project on the CODING DevOps platform. Take product demand as an example. After the demand planning department registers the demand, it will enter the review process. After the requirements review is passed, the product team can proceed with product design. If the product design and UI design plan pass the review, the product manager will give a product presentation to the relevant project personnel. Developers can start to write code after the requirements are clear and correct; and testers can prepare test cases in the early stage of development and test after the development and coding to ensure that the product can be released and launched stably.

In addition to "requirements", Baiguoyuan has also configured workflows of "tasks", "defects" and other custom items that are suitable for its own business conditions to track the flow of all R&D activities within the team and keep abreast of the project dynamics .

Step 2: Migration of stock data to implement tool switching

After determining the use of CODING DevOps for team collaboration, the first problem that Baiguoyuan needs to solve is data migration. How to losslessly migrate existing data scattered on multiple platforms to a unified platform for management? CODING gave a satisfactory answer.

Before implementing the data migration, CODING was faced with the 100+ project, the 1600+ code repository, and the 20,000+ Wiki page. In order to ensure a smooth, lossless and business-insensitive data migration, CODING adopted a method of "research first, then adapt; first pilot, then batch; first overall, then incremental", and gradually realized the project of data decentralization in stages. The management platform, code warehouse, and knowledge management platform were all migrated to the CODING DevOps one-stop platform.

The success of data migration is inseparable from the professional services of the coding technical team and the active cooperation of Baiguoyuan in the early stage of data migration:

• fully investigates : The coding side has conducted many communications and evaluations with Baiguoyuan on the technical status and project requirements, and finally determined the data migration plan suitable for Baiguoyuan, including system docking, product training, data migration and acceptance, etc. stage.
• Reasonable planning : For the multiple stages of the entire process before, during and after data migration, CODING and Baiguoyuan reasonably split the matters and formulated a detailed work plan, which was completed by the two parties at the agreed time point. Before the implementation of the first migration, the technical team of CODING disassembled nearly a hundred items to ensure that the migration plan can be implemented accurately.
• professional support 4 technical trainings (covering 400+ personnel) to Pagoda before data migration to ensure that the personnel of Pagoda can quickly get started with CODING DevOps after one-stop data migration. Smoothly carry out teamwork.

The third step: assist in the docking of self-developed systems to fully support the success of customers

After completing the data migration, in response to the need to obtain multi-dimensional project data for the self-developed measurement and audit system of Baiguoyuan, the coding technical team provided professional support and successfully assisted Baiguoyuan to complete the connection between the self-developed system and the CODING DevOps platform.

Baiguoyuan’s self-developed measurement and audit tool displays the iteration information in the project in the form of a project kanban, including the estimated completion time of the iteration, the progress, and the details of all tasks in the iteration. These metric data can be obtained smoothly Open API Coding provides a rich data interface, supports querying different types of project information, such as item details, iteration details, item attribute settings, etc., and provides diversified source data for the self-developed measurement and audit tool of Baiguoyuan.

CODING Open API 's open capabilities and maturity, coupled with the professional level of the technical support team, fully support customer success.

All-in-one tools, Baiguoyuan starts the DevOps journey

After realizing data migration, Baiguoyuan got rid of the trouble of multi-tool management. Through the one-stop CODING DevOps platform, Baiguoyuan can easily create a standardized R&D management process, improve R&D efficiency, and reduce tool maintenance costs.

One-stop R&D tool chain, teamwork speed up and efficiency

Members of Baiguoyuan can log in to a one-stop platform for team project collaboration with only one coding account, without frequently switching to different platforms. The unified work portal and account system not only help Baiguoyuan improve its R&D efficiency, but also reduce the use, maintenance and cost of its R&D tools.

In the demand stage, the project manager looks at the specific product requirements in the "Project Collaboration" and decomposes the specific development tasks, test tasks, and release verification tasks according to the requirements.

After the product manager completes the requirement analysis and product design, he can use the Wiki to write product documentation in the "Document Management".

In the development phase, developers write code in the "code warehouse" and bind it to specific project requirements when submitting the code.

In the testing phase, testers can write test cases in "Test Management", create corresponding test plans, finally record test results, and generate test reports with one click.

After the product is released and online, all project members can archive process documents through Wiki, accumulate experience within the team, promote knowledge sharing and transfer, and create a team culture of continuous improvement and feedback.

Requirement codes are interconnected and teamwork is transparent

Before using CODING DevOps, Baiguoyuan faced the problem that requirements could not be associated with code. The information of requirements and code is separated, and it is difficult for managers to grasp the development status of requirements in real time, and they cannot identify potential schedule risks in time. The powerful resource association capability of the CODING DevOps platform solves this problem. The data is exchanged among various functional modules, and project members can associate project items with corresponding code versions, test cases, Wiki documents, etc. as needed; conversely, any code changes can also be closely related to project items. All project requirements can be tracked, and the corresponding R&D process is clear and traceable, which brings great convenience to project members.

Zero-cost function expansion, online management of test cases

Different from Atlassian's developer ecology, CODING provides full open one-stop capabilities. No need to pay for plug-ins or additional customization features, Baiguoyuan can enjoy the full capabilities of the CODING DevOps one-stop platform. For example, Baiguoyuan’s initial requirement was to centralize the management of projects, codes, and documents on the same platform. However, after learning about the "test management" function of CODING DevOps, Baiguoyuan decided to migrate the test cases to online management.

Before using CODING DevOps, Baiguoyuan's testers needed to use Excel to manage test cases. With the increasing number of test cases, repeated manual operations are prone to errors and time consuming. In addition, the offline management method is difficult to achieve flexible grouping of test cases, it is impossible to count the number of use cases in a visual way, and it is not convenient to update the use cases frequently or precipitate the baseline use cases, which may easily cause the loss of use cases or the confusion of grouping.

After using CODING DevOps, Baiguoyuan got rid of the predicament of manually managing test cases. By filling in simple Excel or Xmind templates, test cases can be imported to the web page in batches with one click. Test cases required for the same version release are included in the same group, and then divided according to product functions. As said by the person in charge of the testing team of Baiguoyuan, the test cases are managed online, and the grouping logic and quantity of the test cases are clearly visible, which facilitates the evaluation of the test workload and scope. The constantly iterative baseline test cases can also be easily updated and maintained online. In addition, after the release of the version, the test team can also deposit the test problems or valuable information found in this version in the CODING DevOps Wiki document, which facilitates the sharing of experience between team members and continuously improves the quality of work.

In addition to "test management", Baiguoyuan has also begun to use the "continuous integration" and "product library" capabilities of the CODING DevOps platform on a small scale, and will continue to explore in depth to achieve full one-stop capability landing, and truly build a Baiguoyuan Integrated research and development system.

Convenient mobile office, "Coding Anytime Anywhere"

In the past, because some services were deployed on intranet nodes, the developers of Baiguoyuan relied on the intranet environment for office work, and additional configuration was required for mobile office. CODING DevOps supports multiple terminals such as enterprise WeChat applets, WeChat applets, H5 pages, etc. The members of Baiguoyuan do not need to configure additional VPN, open a browser to log in to their workbench, move office anytime, anywhere, or view through the WeChat applet Event progress and news notifications, keep track of project dynamics.

In future plans, the development team of Baiguoyuan will gradually migrate the entire development environment to the public cloud of CODING, and truly realize "Coding Anytime Anywhere" on the cloud.

Work together to explore DevOps best practices and continue to build a new industry ecosystem

In the process of coupling between Coding and Baiguoyuan, the PMO and Quality Department of Baiguoyuan analyze and evaluate the project value (such as energy efficiency or quality improvement) from a macro perspective starting from the entire company level, and work with Coding to evaluate the functions and functions of the products. Using the process to conduct a comprehensive discussion, and finally chose to cooperate with CODING.

Using the coding one-stop platform is not a simple tool switch for Baiguoyuan, but an important first step in the practice of DevOps with CODING. In the future, CODING will carry out long-term cooperation with Baiguoyuan, continue to explore and discuss in the practice of DevOps, and jointly build a new digital ecology of DevOps in the retail industry.