Spotlight: Pipeline Blueprints

At ParentPay Group, I quickly noticed that almost every team was tackling CI/CD in isolation. YAML pipelines were scattered across repositories, often duplicated, with each project tweaking its own version of the same core logic. It worked, but it was messy — wasting effort, slowing delivery, and introducing inconsistency across the organisation.

I set out to solve this with what became known as the YAML Blueprint — a framework of reusable, plug-and-play templates that teams could assemble to create reliable pipelines quickly and consistently.

Instead of copying and pasting whole YAML files, developers could now:

• reference shared templates,
• pull in jobs and stages as building blocks,
• and add only the logic specific to their project.

The technical backbone of the Blueprint included:

• Centralised template library in Azure Repos to act as the single source of truth.
• Abstracted variables and parameters, allowing pipelines to be configured without rewriting logic.
• Modular templates for build, test, deploy, reusable across both infrastructure and application projects.
• Built-in gates and checks for governance.

More importantly, the Blueprint allowed me to introduce mandatory quality and security controls into every pipeline:

• Kiuwan Code Analysis enforced code quality.
• ServiceNow integration ensured all deployments were tracked and auditable.
• Netsparker scanning embedded security testing as a default step.

Adoption was smooth: teams quickly saw the value in not reinventing the wheel. What once took days to piece together could now be done in hours with confidence.

Closing

The YAML Blueprint turned CI/CD from a fragmented, error-prone process into a unified, scalable system. It reduced duplication, accelerated delivery, and raised the bar on governance across the business.

For me, it reinforced a core DevOps lesson: the real power of automation isn’t just in writing scripts — it’s in creating blueprints that scale across teams, so every engineer benefits from the collective knowledge of the organisation.