Journey from failure to success

Three stages of the journey described, from v1.0 to v3.0

Started new job
Day 3 - noticed no log of test cases. No one knew what they were doing. Not even starting from nothing - starting from -5!.
No DevOps, no DB team. Most infrastructure on AWS. All manual (testing, deployment)
1 monolithic app (no microservices)
Deployment - all manual processes. 3-4 hrs.
Step-by-step written down -> reduced downtime.
Move from excel for test cases
Project lasts 6 months - 1yr
6 people. 0 to 5000 test cases in 1.5 years. (manual)
- someone mentioned coverage is more important than quantity
Talked about automation for 1 year but didn't have time.
QA team was always referred to as a bottleneck - got the sense that this was derogatory.

Introduced Infrastructure as code. This took deployment time down from 3 hours to 5-10mins for deployment
Moved from monolith to microservices
Introduced Jenkins
Matrix of compatibility for product components

Someone asked if replaced one problem with another?

Containerised apps
zero downtime
devops -> platform engineering
Jenkins -> Argo
Deliver faster, more reliable
Product owner doesn't care how frequently deployed (1/month, 1/week, 5/day etc.)- as long as a project is delivered in 1 year for example

The journey from v1.0 to v3.0 took 6 years
Asked if any advice for a department to move them from v1.0 to v3.0:
- Befriend someone in top management to push ideas faster
- Remove those with high performance, low loyalty from the company - Low performance and loyal is preferable.

Failure stories that became success or not (QA, DevOps, ...)