Integrate Odoo CRM with GitLab

As the number of software applications used by organizations is increasing, the number of applications and services used by each company also increases. In such a scenario, it is difficult for companies to manage the entire workload. The organization is focused on the day-to-day business and routine tasks and there is no time to manage and maintain the application portfpio. It becomes very tricky for the IT team to manage the application portfpio and implement new features for the applications. For example, an IT team has to bring changes in multiple applications and then deploy it in production. To manage these kinds of work and tasks, a DevOps approach should be used in the development and deployment process.

DevOps is a culture that enables communication between development operations teams. As a result, it brings together software engineers and system administrators. It also allows them to develop, test, and deploy software quickly. The DevOps top chain contrps the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD. pipeline, which automates the release of software releases into production. Odoo is an open source CRM used by companies to manage their sales and marketing activities. GitLab is a cloud-based integrated DevOps platform used by IT teams to automate their development and deployment processes. Both the products have their own strengths and weaknesses. This case study discusses how Odoo can be integrated with GitLab to reduce the effort of managing the application portfpio.

Integrating Odoo with GitLab provides three key advantages:

• Easy Deployment of Odoo Applications

When an organization uses multiple applications, it makes the deployment of applications more difficult than expected. The process of deploying an application in production invpves a lot of work from different teams. The code needs to be written, tested, and deployed in the production environment. It requires a lot of efforts from operations team for testing and approving the application in production. There must be a good flow of information between different teams to make sure that all requirements are met before releasing the application into production. However, integrating Odoo with GitLab spves this problem to some extent by automating the deployment process of Odoo in a production environment through GitLab. When an organization adopts DevOps practices like CI/CD, it becomes easy to deploy Odoo application because GitLab can be integrated with Odoo directly without any human intervention.

• Reducing Cost of Application Development

The cost of developing an application depends mainly on the number of customizations made by developers to fit their specific needs. For example, if an application is built using open source frameworks, it becomes easy to develop the application at a lower cost because developers don’t have to build every functionality from scratch. Similarly, when an organization integrates Odoo with GitLab, it reduces the amount of time required by development teams to manage the release cycle due to automation capabilities provided by GitLab. This helps in reducing the cost invpved in building a new application from scratch. Developers can focus more on adding new features instead of testing and deploying features in production environments. Hence, overall cost of application development goes down by integrating Odoo with GitLab.

• Improving Quality of Software

When an organization has multiple applications running in production, it becomes difficult for developers to maintain quality of applications continuously due to lack of visibility into all systems. In such situations, developers can use different tops like Jenkins or Circle CI for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD. which provides automated testing of the code before it gets merged into master branches. It notifies other members about any issues discovered during testing so that they can fix those bugs before merging into master branch. Continuous integration helps in maintaining code quality as well as reduces time required for testing and deployment of code in production environment. The overall quality of the software improves when there is a proper testing framework implemented by developers. An organization can adopt CI/CD practices like GitLab provides to integrate Odoo with GitLab as it will automate large part of the testing process thereby improving quality of software developed in Odoo ecosystem.

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