Vincenzo was hired in the context of the Digital programme to create a common Drupal platform for more than 100 British Council country sites. When he joined the organisation, they had no real agile in place, no proper Drupal platform laid out for the goal they had targeted, no proper development practices in place. Vincenzo took care of introducing a modern, agile, development process taking into account all the peculiarities of the Drupal platform.
Main roles covered
Development Process Manager, Drupal Engineer, Solutions Architecture
Highlights
- Heavy contribution to everything from the codebase management to the development workflow, including deployment, testing strategy, technical architecture;
- The development workflow has been changed from a very basic non-enterprise single-branched one with heterogeneous local development environments, to a professional enterprise one with feature branches, branch&pull model, code-reviews, etc. using a homogeneous vagrant-based local development environment;
- Agile project management has been pushed through, using Scrum, and relevant supporting tools, like JIRA+Greenhopper+Confluence with Github integration have also been adopted. The Scrum process has then been tied in with the development process to make the two a single smooth and integrated process;
- Last but not the least, a strong contribution to the architecture of the core Drupal platform as well as to its delicate 3-stage deployment (also replicated on the local environment) has been made. Best practice, coding standards, quality, etc. have been assured.
- Minor: some early time was reserved to consulting for another platform being built on the WordPress CMS.
Achievements
The new platform was finally put in place by January 2013. Between then and May 2015, over 130 sites have been delivered on the same platform. Some of these are: