Keller Williams Accelerates CI/CD Efficiency with Harness
How Keller Williams 6X’d Their Deployment Speed with Harness
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Keller Williams, a leader in the real estate industry, has built its reputation on structured systems and best practices. As the company grew, Keller Williams made a decisive pivot in 2017 to become a technology-driven company, aiming to create a system that aligned seamlessly with its proven business model.
Before adopting Harness, Keller William’s CI/CD workflow was heavily reliant on manual processes. Their team maintained large spreadsheets and Confluence pages, adding layers of complexity and inefficiency to the workflow.
Deployments were time-consuming, often taking an entire week for planning, test case creation, and dependency management. The process was largely in-house, and as a result, Keller Williams was only able to deploy between four and seven times per year, typically syncing releases with their mobile application. The infrequency of deployments made it challenging to iterate quickly and respond to market demands efficiently.
Challenge
Initially, Keller Williams ramped up technology development by hiring contractors to rapidly build new systems. While this approach accelerated initial progress, it also resulted in significant technical debt and architectural inefficiencies. The deployment process was cumbersome, requiring manual interventions and consuming excessive time and resources. Prior to adopting Harness, Keller Williams managed only four major software deployments per year, each requiring up to three weeks to complete, followed by additional weeks for post-deployment fixes. The lack of automation and streamlined processes not only slowed down innovation but also negatively impacted the morale of the technology teams.
- Slow Deployment Cadence: With only 4-6 releases annually, the team struggled to deliver updates quickly.
- Complex Planning & Testing: Each deployment involved multiple meetings, spreadsheets, and planning sessions, leading to significant delays.
- Limited Innovation: The infrequent release cycle forced us to bundle many features into each release, making testing and deployment even more cumbersome.
- Business Impact: The slow release cycle affected agility, delaying feature rollouts and limiting their ability to innovate at the pace of the market.
“When evaluating a new solution, we followed a "rules before tools" approach, defining our ideal feature set before selecting a vendor. Harness stood out due to its ease of implementation, maintainability, and comprehensive feature set that best aligned with our needs.”
- Chris Synan, Vice President of Engineering at Keller Williams
Transformation with Harness
“Since migrating to Harness, we've dramatically increased our deployment frequency. What was once a quarterly process has now become a weekly—and in some cases, daily—occurrence”
- Brandon Taylor-Nelson, Principal Software Architect at Keller Williams
Key Improvements:
- Deployment Frequency: We’ve scaled from 4-6 releases per year to over 23 within the first year of adoption—a sixfold increase.
- Operational Efficiency: Releases now require minimal meetings and coordination. Instead of extensive planning sessions, we can approve deployments via Slack and push updates seamlessly.
- Business Agility: With Harness, we can now release updates based on product readiness rather than being constrained by an outdated deployment schedule.
- Improved Team Culture: The cumbersome release process previously created stress and bottlenecks. Now, the streamlined workflow allows their team to focus on innovation rather than logistics.
Harness provided a cutting-edge CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) platform that enabled Keller Williams to automate and streamline its deployment processes. The implementation included:
- Fully automated testing and deployment pipelines.
- Integration with existing tools such as GitHub and JIRA to minimize workflow disruption.
- A significant reduction in manual interventions, leading to consistent and reliable software releases.
“With our enhanced CI/CD pipeline, we are delivering updates at the speed of business. Agents and customers now benefit from more frequent improvements, reinforcing confidence in our technology. By ensuring a seamless experience, we help our agents better serve their clients in finding their perfect home.
- Chris Cox, CTO at Keller Williams
Future Plans with Harness
Looking ahead, Keller Williams plans to expand their use of Harness by integrating the new Database DevOps product to replace their existing bespoke migration system. Additionally, they aim to enhance their Feature Flags capabilities to facilitate split experiments and improve feature rollouts.
