Turnitin Sees 98% Deployment Success Within Months

SUMMARY:

Founded in 1997, Turnitin is an internet-based plagiarism detection service. Universities and high schools use their SaaS-based website to check submitted documents against content in its database to check for plagiarism. Their mission is to “ensure the integrity of global education and meaningfully improve learning outcomes.”

NEED:

The Turnitin team found that their day-to-day work was becoming more difficult as the business grew. While deployment time was increasing, it became more difficult to avoid overwriting changes. With a growing team and new pathways of collaboration, many developers found it difficult to ensure their code followed best practices.

The team simply had to tackle these code quality challenges as they occurred, by implementing changes directly in production and/or by using Changesets (standard Salesforce functionality). They also quickly realized that the processes being followed had led to other underlying issues. As these underlying issues started to affect their systems and end users, Turnitin decided to expand the team further and focus on cleaning up their Salesforce instance. This is when they turned to Flosum.

SOLUTION:

One of the major challenges they were able to overcome was the previous need to make direct changes in Production. After successfully bridging the code quality gap and using new merge capabilities, this saved a tremendous amount of time and allowed for high quality code pushed to production to remain untouched.

Turnitin’s org has many business processes, flows and code that run on the back end. The ability to make changes natively (Impact analysis feature) saved them a tremendous amount of time as well as prevented code from being overwritten.

To further enforce code quality, they implemented the use of pull requests that allow their developers to review code before it’s deployed. The inline comments are a favorite feature of the team. Another feature that has provided great success is the pipeline functionality which automates DevOps workflows. Time saved from automation is very valuable, especially when tackling major projects.

Initially, Flosum and release management would take up most of the day, but since they began to implement automation, they've been able to focus on other key areas as well as Flosum. The team loves the fact that they can create their own logic between branches/orgs and even the repository.

RESULT:

Flosum initially gave the Turnitin team an overview on how they are managing their environments. Every single time an impact analysis was performed, they would see differences that they did not recognize. Also, implementing the comparison functionality allowed them to understand the lack of data between their test environments and production. They were able to schedule sandbox refreshes accordingly to ensure that data matched production. This improved testing, eliminated major differences, and saved time. It boosted their confidence to take ownership of managing their environment. Furthermore, they saw great improvement in deployment success.

Previously, there would be frequent deployment failures and code coverage issues. Since acquiring Flosum, deployment rate & success improved significantly. The ability to rollback changes gives Turnitin that extra assurance that no work can be lost/damaged. They also noticed that Flosum eliminated code overwrites with its branch merge functionality. Turnitin is now able to compare branches seamlessly and prevent any code work from being lost.

In addition, Flosum's pull request functionality provides that extra layer of security. Not only has Flosum improved their system, they can deploy changes frequently and effectively. Their Salesforce instance is becoming more stable and are now able to tackle problems with ease.

Previously, they would have scratched their heads thinking of a way to streamline their process to prevent problems, but now developers can confidently identify the problem and fix it immediately with the new processes put in place.

“It has also had a positive impact on me personally,” says Faizan Ali, Salesforce Consultant for Turnitin. “With the great automation functionality Flosum provides, I am able to manage my time more effectively and diversify my knowledge into other areas. I can complete other tasks knowing that I have an automated tool (pipelines) to handle my daily tasks (such as deployment, committing to the repo).”

Faizan continued to say, “I have not only learned a tremendous amount, but gained confidence in my role. I wanted to try something different and release management was something I always wanted to dig my hands into. Trying something new is nerve-wracking, but when I started using Flosum it made me love my job. I was able to view release management from a whole different perspective. I was able to come up with new processes and ideas that allow me to improve our system.”

Since the implementation of Flosum, Turnitin’s team has seen 98% deployment success and has saved 45% of their developer’s time.