Dealflow: An IT competition for Startups

Background: Mühlemann & Popp is a Swiss-based firm that creates digital business models and develops them into successful companies. Innovators bring them an idea for a business, and M&P delivers digital competence and the IT team to bring those ideas to life in the online space. Since 2010, their team of 20 engineers and business developers have created over ten successful startups.

Goals: To help discover new ideas that needed a digital jump-start, M&P created Dealflow, an IT competition. Not only did this bring smart ideas to light, but Dealflow also helps entrepreneurs with good ideas find money to inject into their business from investors looking to invest in excellent digital solutions. The biggest obstacle was communications during the app development process. M&P needed to amplify the QA process with a notification system that would deliver messages to the appropriate decision-makers concerning code successes and next steps. This was especially important considering project finance decisions.

Solution & Results: Jenkins helps M&P run tests and save reports quickly and easily for the analytics team. We use Allure reporting with screenshots in case of failures. For the automated pipeline system, we have two QA's built-in, triggered by time and commits. And the Slack plugin helps us send test reports to those who need to be kept informed during the project.

The key capabilities we relied on were varied. For the QA team, we looked for capabilities and notifications plugins that showed business progress and highlighted the product's quality. For the developers, we relied on the Allure plugin to indicate technical details as they relate to failures.

The results are typical of many other Jenkins installations:

• increased number of new releases: for our purposes, 1X / week
• team managers always know the status of a project at every stage of development
• issues can be highlighted, discovered, and remedied quickly