CircleCI is the world’s largest shared continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, and the central hub where code moves from idea to delivery. As one of the most-used DevOps tools that processes more than 1 million builds a day, CircleCI has unique access to data on how engineering teams work, and how their code runs. Companies like Spotify, Coinbase, Stitch Fix, and BuzzFeed use us to improve engineering team productivity, release better products, and get to market faster.

Authenticating

CircleCI uses API Key based auth, a developer-friendly delegated access protocol. Quolum has already connected the necessary wires with CircleCI. Using a sequence of click-throughs, your organization's administrator allows Quolum to make API calls to CircleCI without getting access to passwords.

Step 1: Initiate a connection to CircleCI

Click the Connect button from the Connections card. If you are not an admin, you can invite your organization's CircleCI admin to make a connection to your CircleCI organization account. When you click on the Connect button, the web browser will navigate to the CircleCI login page.

Step 2: Log in to CircleCI

Log in to CircleCI using your organization's credentials. The exact login mechanism may depend on your CircleCI plan, and the sign-in mechanism used. You may have corporate SSO such as Azure AD, GSuite, or Okta along with multi-factor authentication. Once you have successfully logged-in you can find the API Key and API Secret as mentioned below in Step 3.

Step 3: Back to Quolum

Once you have granted access to Quolum, CircleCI is going to send you back to Quolum's page in Step 1, where you started. The Connect button on the Connections card would now say Reconnect. Reconnect is used to reauthenticate under circumstances where the access has expired.

Under the hood

Using the OAuth protocol, Quolum now has delegated access to your CircleCI Workspace. The Quolum server, running on Amazon AWS VPC, will be able to make API calls and retrieve feature-level utilization of projects, stories, and tasks. Later, this data is crunched and available for visualization on the Quolum dashboard.