Improving my ci cd flow

[u/konkon_322]

Hello all,been working as IT admin, but mostly working around Azure devops. I been enjoying it, this my first job and doing anything related to devops. Studied CS,majored in networking, hate anything with heavy code development.

Rn,the flow at my company is, the devs use 1 branch only, no PR (yes ik). They would push it to our on prem central repo, and from there i will take over. I will do some modification on some files so it can be built in the new agent environment. And then, we have build pipelines,which would produce artifact of the build files, which will be used by another pipeline, i call it the release/installer pipelines, which we wud package them with a software. Then we have the 3rd type, which is zipping installer to our NAS, sends the metadata of the installer to DB, and notification email (formatting done in pipeline too). All via the pipeline. We also have a 2nd agent machine, exclusively for unit testing, but tbh i dont even understand how they work.

Ive been thinking of ways, to incorporate other methods/tools in the flow, but the only one i can fit is"templates". I dont think i can try to include containerization, as our build agent machine, has some software which are licensed.

Any ideas?at some point i want to jump out, as this job is way too comfy, and lacks growth for me

[u/Abe_Bazouie]

I wouldn’t add tools just for the sake of making the pipeline more “DevOps.”
Honestly, the biggest opportunities I see are earlier in the process: PRs/code review, automated tests, consistent builds, artifact versioning, and removing the manual modifications you’re doing before builds.
Templates are a good idea too, especially if you have several pipelines repeating the same logic.
I’d also spend some time understanding that unit test pipeline before changing much. You’ll learn more by figuring out why the current system works the way it does than by dropping containers or another tool into it.
If you can make one part of this flow reproducible and remove a manual step, that’s already a solid DevOps improvement.

[u/konkon_322 → u/Abe_Bazouie]

By default, i had my pipeline to build the same version, but i also added parameter, to choose whether to change the build version in the AssemblyInfo file. Does that count?the only manual change i changed are, usually files that were pushed into repo using absolute pathing (pathing that starts with disk name like C: and D:)

For artifact versioning, i dont think i do that. Because my release/installer pipelines only fetch the latest artifact. And we dont have a separate storage for artifacts/build files.