New Build and Deploy Automation

Our software build and deployment process was taking too long to execute (about 90 minutes to QA). Even though this process was scripted, it took a fair amount of manual intervention, and prevented us from deploying our software to QA as often as we wished. We took a pause from our regular sprint schedule, and dedicated a week to improve this process. After we diagrammed our existing workflow, and identified the "low hanging fruit", we determined that we first needed to look at at a build server or service. We were hoping to fully automate this solution, and bring our deployment process under 30 minutes (ideally with little to no human interaction).

As a .net environment, and a user of Bitbucket (using Mercurial), we intended to take a look at both Atlassian's Bamboo, and TFS build and deploy services using visualstudio.com. After quickly doing a little research on build services, I found this article by Scott Hanselman. Though this post was nearly two years old, we thought Appveyor was worth a look, while continuing to research competitive solutions. We soon realized that our existing Powershell scripts could be used with little modifications, AND this service didn't require us to support a server (I love PaaS). Compared to other solutions, we felt that Appveyor met all our needs, was very quick to implement, and at $60/month - seemed like a great fit.

You can probably imagine how this story ends - we really like the Appveyor solution. Upon a source control commit (from Bitbucket), a build and deploy is automatically triggered, and this unattended process takes approx 10-20 minutes - exceeding our 30 minute deploy goal, and with it being entirely automatic - exceeded our expectations by requiring virtually no man-hours.

Kudos to you Appveyor for making this a pretty easy transition with enormous benefits
(No, I'm not a product spokesperson)