Overview
At adesso I worked as a Senior Full-Stack Software Engineer on client projects in banking, health insurance, insurance and building services, for clients including Deutsche Bank, Bitmarck and B&O Gruppe. Teams had 8 to 12 developers.
Bitmarck is the IT service provider for statutory health insurers in Germany. For more than eight months I worked on a white-label app used by several insurers, which meant regular releases had to work for each of them.
Releasing was slower than it needed to be. I rebuilt the release pipeline and cut deployment time by more than half.
My role
- Client requirements analysis
- Technical concepts and application architecture
- Full-stack development
- Code reviews and 70%+ test coverage
- CI/CD with Jenkins and GitHub workflows
- Cloned Kubernetes environments
- Interim Product Owner
- Sprint and release planning months ahead
- Client workshops
- Technical documentation
How I approached it
Make every environment reproducible
Cloned Kubernetes environments meant that what was tested was what went live, instead of each environment drifting on its own.
Automate the path to production
Jenkins and GitHub workflows took manual steps out of releasing, which made deployments faster and less dependent on individuals.
Quality as a gate, not a phase
Code reviews and at least 70% test coverage were part of the pipeline, so speed didn’t come at the cost of stability.
Key decisions
- Plan releases months aheadAs interim Product Owner I planned sprints and releases several months in advance, so clients and teams knew what was coming.
- Bridge users and engineersI turned users’ needs into clear specifications that developers could build from, and took over interim project leadership for one product launch.
Outcome
Deployment time dropped by more than half. Over the project I managed 28 releases, 4 of them major.
What I learned
Being both an engineer and the interim Product Owner taught me how much of delivery is about the bridge between users and the team: a clear specification saves more time than any pipeline.