Standardizing Development, Testing, and Deployment to Boost R&D Efficiency at Tencent Meeting

Tencent senior management consultant Qiao Liang emphasizes that consistency is essential for improving efficiency; without standards, scattered micro‑services lead to repeated discussions, duplicated work, and reduced team morale.

Since the second half of 2020, Tencent Meeting launched a six‑month initiative to build a foundational R&D efficiency system, focusing on four domains: development, testing, deployment, and operations, each delivering targeted solutions.

The article raises a common question—why there is no "requirement domain"—and argues that starting improvements from the self‑level (individual and team practices) is more effective than assuming all problems stem from requirements.

Development Domain: Following the principle of "engineering consistency," the team unified the programming language and framework to Go and tRPC, and standardized the CI/CD pipeline. This reduces fragmentation and creates a common deployment workflow.

To handle existing business modules, the strategy includes blocking new additions, time‑boxed refactoring, and limiting support for legacy code.

Testing Domain: The team tackled three key areas: environment governance, rapid updates, and API testing/performance testing. Environment governance separates environment construction and orchestration, enabling on‑demand creation of isolated test environments and dynamic composition of service images for private deployments.

Rapid updates shifted from a "compile‑package‑cold‑update" model to a "compile‑upload‑hot‑update" model, dramatically reducing the time required for small changes.

Further improvements include providing scaffolding tools, performance analysis utilities, and an "interface‑as‑documentation" tool.

For more detailed information, see the linked article "How to Achieve Industry‑Leading R&D Efficiency: The Story Behind Tencent Meeting".