A major plantation company running a suite of ERP and API applications supporting its production, distribution, HR, and financial operations. These systems were historically hosted and maintained manually using traditional deployment methods.
Manual Deployment Process
Every deployment—whether minor patches or full releases—was carried out manually by IT staff. This led to inconsistencies, prolonged downtimes, and high human error probability.
No Version Control in Deployments
There was no standard procedure to track what changes went live. In the event of bugs or crashes, it was difficult to trace back the root cause or revert changes accurately.
Environment Discrepancies
QA and Production environments often had configuration drifts, leading to bugs that only showed up post-deployment.
Rollback Issues
Reverting a deployment required manual intervention, backups, and reconfigurations—making the process risky and time-consuming.
Developer Overhead
Developers had to coordinate with deployment teams to publish even small updates, leading to delays in delivery and testing.
Project Objective
To modernize Client development and release process, Aabasoft aimed to:
- Automate deployments across Development, QA, and Production environments
- Introduce source control branching strategies for stability
- Minimize human error through automatic CI/CD processes
- Improve traceability, rollback capability, and deployment visibility
Aabasoft’s Approach
Despite the challenges posed by client's legacy applications and outdated frameworks and project dependencies, Aabasoft successfully implemented a robust CI/CD pipeline.
Branching Strategy & Source Control Structure
Aabasoft restructured client’s Git repository to follow a well-defined branching model:
- Feature Branches: Each developer works independently on isolated branches.
- Development Branch: All feature branches are merged into the dev branch after peer review.
- QA Branch: Once tested in development, the code is merged into the qa branch, triggering the QA deployment automatically.
- Production Branch: Post successful QA validation, final code is merged into prod, which initiates live deployment.
CI/CD Pipeline Setup
CI/CD pipelines were built using tools such as Azure DevOps / GitHub Actions.
Key features include:
- Automated build triggers on branch merges.
- Stage-wise deployment approvals.
- Rollback support via tagged builds and versioned artifacts.
These pipelines handled ERP application builds using older frameworks and deployed API projects with dependencies managed appropriately.
Legacy App Compatibility Handling
Client’s infrastructure primarily hosted legacy applications with outdated .NET Frameworks and software dependencies with traditional IIS deployments.
Aabasoft addressed this by:
- Wrapping legacy apps within modern CI tools using custom build agents.
- Ensuring backward compatibility in pipeline scripts.
- Building deployment packages with pre/post-deployment validation scripts.
- Automating IIS configurations and database update scripts.
Security & Environment Consistency
- Introduced environment-based configuration management.
- Secured deployment credentials via key vaults / secrets management.
- Standardized environments using configuration templates to maintain consistency across dev, QA, and prod.
Initial Challenges
- Legacy codebase not supporting modern build tools directly.
- Inconsistent folder structures, undocumented dependencies.
- Long downtime and resistance from in-house teams accustomed to manual deployment.
Recovery & Resolution
- Built custom build agents tailored for Client’s app structure.
- Gradual onboarding of applications to pipeline (phased rollout).
- Worked closely with Client IT teams to document and refactor legacy practices.
- Setup a fallback mechanism during the initial go-live to avoid system disruptions.
Results & Impact
Deployment Time
Error Rate in Releases
Rollback Capability
Deployment Frequency
Developer Productivity
Business Outcomes
Improved Stability
Predictable and testable releases.
Faster Time to Market
New features delivered quicker with fewer regressions.
Reduced Downtime
Automated error-checking and rollback procedures ensured continuous availability.
Audit-Ready Tracking
Every commit, build, and deploy step logged and traceable.
