How a Leading QSR Brand Streamlined CI/CD with Harness

Client Overview

The client is a major U.S.-based quick-service restaurant (QSR) enterprise and one of the largest brands in its sector. Founded in the 1980s, the company has expanded to thousands of locations across domestic and international markets. With dual headquarters in the United States, it operates a franchise-driven model supported by significant investments in digital ordering, delivery, and e-commerce capabilities.

As a global consumer-facing organization, the client prioritizes operational consistency, scalability, and customer experience. Their current focus is centered around modernizing technology platforms, streamlining operations, and enhancing agility to support evolving market and consumer demands.

The Challenge

The client’s DevOps environment relied heavily on Jenkins for network and systems automation. Over time, this led to operational inefficiencies, complex job maintenance, and limited scalability. The immediate challenge was to migrate hundreds of critical jobs into Harness without disrupting business operations. Key pain points included:

• Scale of Automation: Over 200 platform automation jobs, 20+ SRE automations, and 50+ systems administration automations.

• Functional Parity: Ensuring Harness jobs accurately replicated Jenkins workflows.

• Agile Alignment: Adhering to strict standards for backlog creation, epic/story composition, and definition of done.

• Stakeholder Validation: Maintaining close collaboration to ensure confidence in each migration phase.
  

The Avyka Approach

To overcome these challenges, Avyka applied its structured Jenkins-to-Harness migration framework, designed to reduce complexity while creating long-term value for the client. The approach combined deep technical assessment, automation, and agile delivery practices to ensure both speed and accuracy:

• Comprehensive Assessment: Conducted a thorough review of over 200 Jenkins jobs to map migration pathways, identify redundancies, and highlight areas for optimization. This ensured that the migration was not just a lift-and-shift but an opportunity to improve efficiency.

• Agile Backlog Creation: Partnered with client stakeholders to build a prioritized backlog, breaking down requirements into clear epics and user stories. This collaborative roadmap created alignment between business and technical teams.

• Sprint-Based Delivery: Executed the migration in 2–3 week sprints, providing visibility into progress and ensuring rapid feedback loops. This iterative approach minimized risks while maintaining steady momentum.

• Validation & Knowledge Transfer: Validated every migrated job with the client’s engineering teams to confirm accuracy and maintain functional parity. Alongside this, Avyka transferred best practices to strengthen the client’s in-house capabilities.

• Legacy Job Retirement: Systematically decommissioned Jenkins jobs once validated, making Harness
  

Results(In Progress)

The engagement is currently mid-implementation and on pace for completion within a 12-week window. By modernizing its CI/CD pipelines with Harness, the client is positioned to realize both immediate and long-term benefits:

• Improved Pipeline Efficiency: Faster execution flows and reduced complexity will enable development teams to ship changes more quickly and with fewer errors.

• Reusable Frameworks: The creation of generic, reusable pipeline templates will simplify the onboarding of new applications and accelerate future delivery cycles.

• Integrated Security: Harness-native SAST, DAST, and SCA scanning will embed security directly into the pipelines, improving the client’s DevSecOps maturity and reducing vulnerabilities earlier in the lifecycle.

• Operational Agility: A more streamlined, standardized pipeline environment will allow the client to scale automation across business units without adding overhead.

Conclusion

Avyka’s structured approach is helping the client replace legacy Jenkins jobs with a scalable Harness environment that improves efficiency, embeds security, and enables faster innovation. By focusing on both immediate pipeline optimization and long-term value creation, the engagement is setting a strong foundation for modern DevSecOps practices across the organization.