How Worldline used DevOps to improve products and services
Worldline technical director Lee Sunter tells Computing how DevOps and agile methodologies has helped improve the company's flexibility
In the digital age, business success is increasingly underpinned by technical excellence. Organisations must develop and deploy quality software and apps frequently to stay ahead of rivals and keep customers happy.
While that's no easy feat, DevOps has emerged as an effective solution for organising IT teams to do be able to perform those tasks more effectively. It's become a popular software development approach that eradicates the silo between dev and operations teams, allowing them to release new features, bug fixes and updates in an agile and lean manner.
Just like many other businesses, payment and transactional services provider Worldline has adopted agile and DevOps practices in a bid to streamline the software development lifecycle, modernise legacy delivery models and empower teams to achieve the best possible results.
"We decided to implement DevOps as part of our journey to improve product and services delivery and to provide a better experience to our customers and their customers - be that through faster deliveries, the ability to respond to change or increased quality," says Lee Sunter, technical director at Worldline.
"This is especially important to us as we provide a core set of products and services to multiple customers, so it's in our interest to make the development and support teams synonymous."
Embracing change
For many organisations and IT professionals, DevOps will be a completely new way-of-working in an industry dominated by traditional waterfall approaches. But Sunter admits that there isn't one simple formula for rolling out DevOps.
"Within the UK, we have had various journeys as our business is made up of many projects, products, teams and locations - all with their own opportunities and challenges. It is a journey, and each journey can be different and also different for each individual, team and solution with their own pace, constraints, enablers and blockers," he says.
When it comes to adopting anything new, it's important to understand the things you want to achieve and all the factors involved right from the start, says Sunter. "We have a culture of wanting to improve and we have a common vision to improve our ability and customer satisfaction, even if there are further business unit targets.
"To support this, we have a common process called The Worldline Way, which takes principles from the agile manifesto and shapes it into a Worldline UK&I context to act as our playbook - providing a background framework. But that was customised to suit the specifics of the local teams dependent on their technologies and product approach."
Implementing new tech
So far, Worldline has integrated its development, testing and support teams; embedded testing at the start of development; and, transformed legacy IT capabilities by introducing agile practices and automation tools. It's even formed a Digital Delivery Unit to introduce DevOps within new products and solutions.
"I have seen a real enthusiasm and adoption of change throughout our journey. The team now lead themselves in their journey after the initial adoption of agile," says Sunter. "The phrase ‘eat your own dog food' sums this paradigm shift in the realisation that what you develop you have to support. It focuses the mind, and that's where the tooling comes in to help the dev/support teams assure their code more efficiently.'
Sunter and teams are using a range of DevOps tools daily, with the aim of increasing productivity and communication across the organisation. "We adopted Atlassian tools to help us get our tasks and collaboration in alignment. In parallel, we also adopted unit testing tools in our Java and .Net code, along with Jenkins and GitLab CI for our builds, and then used SonarQube to analyse our code to maintain our quality," he tells Computing.
"We use Selenium or Squish to automate our system testing code and included members of the test team to build our agile team. This has resulted in closer working with our traversal platform team, aligning their team members with the agile team to foster collaboration and a one team approach.
"They then use tools such as Terraform for provisioning of AWS infrastructure and resources, and use Cloud-Init scripts for server instance configuration and then Yum and Chocolatey for package management. We use Ansible and Puppet for managing the changes to the servers - provisioning software, configuration management and application deployment."
The company selected these tools based on trial and error, preference and guidance from its teams. However, Lee says decisions weren't made purely on specific tools but rather the capabilities they provided. He believes that their biggest benefits have been automation and consistency.
Sunter recommends: "Ideally pick something that's relatively ring fenced so you can experiment in how you want to work. DevOps, as with agile, is as much about a mindset change and needs to be with the people first. You can develop processes as you go - for example, use a standard out-of-the-box workflow and then evolve it."
"The main thing for me is to just start, and don't give up if there are setbacks/challenges on the way. Keep a start-up mindset: try, and if you fail, try again. The key is to be able to have the ability to keep trying. So if you are going to fail, then do it fast."
A transformed organisation
Although the DevOps transformation at Worldline is still ongoing, it's already reaping rewards for the company. "We have seen a greater understanding of our estimation and deliverability so we can forecast impacts of changes. And we have become much more flexible, which has helped us respond to customer needs as they change," continues Sunter.
"The test automation and analysis of code built into our continuous integration pipeline has helped us enhance our quality though visibility of unit test code coverage and the impact of code changes. The adoption of automated deployment processes has removed much of the manual steps that we used to have, which reduces the risk and issues of mistakes. We have several entries in the Computing DevOps Excellence Awards 2019 as evidence of our collective efforts."
Over the coming years, Worldline will focus on wider adoption and leverage DevOps to achieve closer integration with its infrastructure team. Sunter concludes: "We have proved this in several areas now so need to spread the word, experience and benefits wider. We also want to look into the use of containerisation, to simplify the dev and release process and provide greater flexibility, and improve the ‘start up' time of projects."
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