Use case
Optimizing Development Pipeline with GitHub Actions for Enhanced Efficiency
- Aaryaman Nigam
About the Customer
SkillForge is a funding-trading company and growth program that offers career-enhancing opportunities for forex traders worldwide. Through its Hyper-Growth plan, SkillForge boosts traders’ capital and profits, helping professional traders scale faster and improve earnings through a structured funding model.
Customer Challenge
SkillForge was facing growing operational risks and inefficiencies in its development-to-staging pipeline. Manual cherry-picking of commits, delayed detection of merge conflicts, and inconsistent alerting slowed down release cycles. These issues not only increased engineering effort but also introduced risks of late-stage deployment failures, untracked code promotion, and misaligned JIRA ticket states.
If these challenges persisted, SkillForge would continue to face longer QA cycles, higher rework costs due to late conflict discovery, and reduced confidence in release planning among stakeholders.
Solution
IAMOPS designed and implemented an automated promotion pipeline using GitHub Actions, fully integrated with JIRA and Slack, to address SkillForge’s development workflow bottlenecks.
Key automation steps included:
- JIRA Key Validation: Ensures that each promotion is linked to a valid JIRA ticket using a formatted key (e.g., ABC-1234) to prevent orphaned code commits.
- PR and Merge Confirmation: Automatically validates that the feature branch has already been merged into dev, preventing unfinished work from entering staging.
- Automated Cherry Pick to Promote Branch: A promote/* branch is created from staging, and relevant commits are cherry-picked. The pipeline is designed with idempotent logic and fallback mechanisms to manage squash merges and re-runs.
- Pull Request Creation and Labeling: The system auto-generates or updates a PR targeting staging, labels it Ready for Staging, and evaluates mergeability.
- Direct Admin Merge: Conflict-free PRs are directly merged to staging using admin privileges, eliminating delays.
- Post-Merge Verification: The pipeline verifies that the exact commit SHA exists on the staging branch before proceeding.
- JIRA Auto-Transition: Tickets are automatically transitioned from Ready for Staging to Ready for Production post verification, ensuring complete traceability.
- Slack Notifications: Over 20 Slack alerts provide real-time status updates, from branch discovery to JIRA ticket transitions.
Throughout the process, IAMOPS followed DevOps best practices, including Infrastructure as Code (IaC), secure token handling, strict branch protections, and peer-reviewed YAML workflows.
Results & Benefits
Qualitative Benefits:
- Zero Manual Promotion Steps: Engineers no longer manually cherry-pick or resolve late-stage conflicts.
- Increased Auditability: Logs from GitHub Actions and Slack alerts ensure end-to-end traceability.
- Tightened Workflow Governance: Auto-mapping of JIRA ticket transitions ensures ticket status reflects actual deployment progress.
Quantitative Benefits:
- Reduced Operational Overhead: The automation of repetitive promotion tasks significantly cut down manual engineering hours.
- Accelerated QA Cycles: Faster staging updates enabled quicker testing and reduced lead times.
- Lower Rollback Rates: Early conflict detection minimized rework by measurable percentages.
- Improved Deployment Cadence: Consistent and reliable cycles improved release predictability and team confidence.
About IAMOPS
IAMOPS is a full DevOps suite company that supports technology companies to achieve intense production readiness.
Our mission is to ensure that our clients’ infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines are scalable, mitigate failure points, optimize performance, ensure uptime, and minimize costs.
Our DevOps suite includes DevOps Core, NOC 24/7, FinOps, QA Automation, and DevSecOps to accelerate overall exponential growth.
As an AWS Advanced Tier Partner and Reseller, we focus on two key pillars: Professionalism by adhering to best practices and utilizing advanced technologies, Customer Experience with responsiveness, availability, clear project management, and transparency to provide an exceptional experience for our clients.
