Interview: Team Iris, Experian, DevOps Excellence Awards finalist
'As a global business, we not only deliver software to multiple markets globally but we have access to engineering talent across the globe.'
DevOps is a methodology for streamlining work across the software development lifecycle. It promotes faster, better and more secure delivery of business value to an organisation's end customers.
Computing's DevOps Excellence Awards showcase outstanding achievements from organisations, personalities and solutions that have successfully applied DevOps methodologies.
This year's winners will be announced at a live awards ceremony on Tuesday, 14th March in London.
One of the finalists is Experian, which has reached the shortlist for both DevOps Professional of the Year and Best Implementation of DevSecOps.
We talked to Team Iris from Experian, in the running for the Best Implementation of DevSecOps, to find out what are they working on this year.
Carl Styan, Jethro Brewin, Andy Ellinor, Liam Robertson and Ginny Sutcliffe form Team Iris, a DevSecOps function within Experian Data Quality (EDQ). Multiskilled and with a strong Agile background, they came from a variety of roles (Development, Operations and QA).
They work closely with Experian Data Quality Product Development Engineering, Operations and InfoSec teams to establish and maintain DevSecOps principles and practices. Embracing continuous delivery in 2017, they support delivery teams with Azure DevOps build and release pipelines, backlogs and wiki in developing on-premise and hosted products. Security tooling was included from the start with linting, static analysis and use of SonarQube.
Computing: Please provide some background on your company for our readers.
Team Iris: Experian is the world's leading global information services company. During life's big moments - from buying a home or a car, to sending a child to college, to growing a business by connecting with new customers - we empower consumers and our clients to manage their data with confidence. We help individuals to take financial control and access financial services, businesses to make smarter decisions and thrive, lenders to lend more responsibly, and organisations to prevent identity fraud and crime.
What makes you different from other technology companies?
As a global business, we not only deliver software to multiple markets globally but we have access to engineering talent across the globe. Our solutions are deployed across the regions we operate in with a 100% uptime against an SLA of 99.95% (over the last 12 months); our engineering teams work across six geographies, collaborating on product development, support & operations, managing workloads & pipelines seamlessly due to the focus and quality we put into DevSecOps. The 20 development teams all work in partnership with DevSecOps and are measured on their maturity of adoption of best practices.
What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?
Automating processes on operating system patching and configuration updates to ensure the highest levels of operational security.
What are you working on this year?
Migrating from a manual continuous delivery tracking process to an automated set of tools which will help us generate a realtime set of reports allowing us to see our delivery teams CI/CD statuses.
Why are events like the DevOps Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?
To showcase and celebrate important software development achievements which don't necessarily get front row recognition in application delivery, and to highlight DevOps engineering as the technically creative role that it is.
DevOps Excellence Awards will take place on 14th March in London. Click here to view the shortlist and here to book your table.