How the Mall Team Leveraged a DevOps Toolchain for Remote Development During the Pandemic

After the Spring Festival, the pandemic forced the mall team to work remotely, but the DevOps improvements implemented in 2019 provided strong support for remote development, thanks to assistance from the corporate DevOps team.

DevOps is defined as an end‑to‑end process that starts from business requirements and proceeds through collaborative development, continuous testing, continuous deployment, and finally delivery to customers.

From May to September 2019, the corporate DevOps team delivered training and hands‑on guidance on workflow and pipeline design. By October 2019 the mall team officially adopted a new work mode based on the DevOps toolchain, reaching a mature stage after two months.

The new workflow relies on core tools such as JIRA, GitLab, Jenkins, Sonar, Docker, and Wiki, establishing three baseline management schemes: code baseline, database baseline, and service‑group baseline, which together support a full‑lifecycle process from requirement to deployment.

Real‑world case study:

01 Create Story – Product owners create user stories; module owners link stories to services and automatically create feature branches.

02 Develop & Debug – After code submission, the pipeline checks the code and deploys it to a dedicated feature environment, allowing parallel development and testing, with product owners reviewing functional demos.

03 Version Build – Once testing and demos are complete, version managers create a version in JIRA, stories are moved into it, and the pipeline produces release artifacts for UAT validation; automated steps handle release branch creation, feature branch merging, and database scripts.

04 Production Release – Pre‑production and production deployments are performed via the same pipeline, ensuring that once UAT passes, the production environment works reliably; the team successfully launched two releases remotely.

Reflections During the Pandemic – The crisis highlighted network and communication challenges but also drove automation and remote work adoption; the DevOps toolchain reduced manual effort and improved visibility through JIRA.

User Feedback – Developers reported higher efficiency, simpler operations, and the ability to see test results remotely, praising the end‑to‑end automation.

Conclusion – This article presents a real case of DevOps enabling remote development for the mall team, demonstrating the value of a full‑stack pipeline and encouraging others to explore the platform.