How the State of Georgia streamlined their QA and UAT process to ship code faster and catch bugs earlier.

Jasmyne Epps (Unit Director, Digital Services Georgia) and James Sansbury (Owner, Tugboat) reveal how Georgia transformed their software delivery lifecycle for GovHub, their Drupal CMS powering 80+ state agency websites.

Traditional staging-server bottlenecks created end-of-sprint QA crunches, delayed releases, team burnout, and expensive rework. Migrating 80+ websites with the existing workflow was infeasible.

Implementing "shift left" moved testing, QA, and stakeholder signoff to pull request time. This distributed QA throughout sprints and caught issues earlier, benefiting developers, QA testers, product managers, and stakeholders.

Key Topics:

• Identifying and eliminating SDLC bottlenecks
• Implementing "shift left" testing in government environments
• Leveraging Docker, CircleCI, and Tugboat for testing infrastructure
• Managing complex migration workflows with parallel testing
• Visual regression testing and automated QA integration
• Secure data handling strategies for realistic test environments