NEDBANK

NEDBANK BIZDEVOPS (DEVOPS CULTURE)

Over the past year, Nedbank has been moving away from the cumbersome waterfall approach into the agile scrum space. With the agile approach, teams work in shorter cycles (sprints) lasting no more than two weeks. Shorter release sprints help teams work more efficiently on client feedback, bug fixes and quicker releases.

Agile scrum brought a lot of agility to the organisation, resulting in some teams moving faster than others.

The lack of collaboration between development, operations, security and testing teams has however resulted in delivery and release processes being viewed as stumbling blocks. Nedbank BizDevOps was born out of the need for better collaboration, faster and quality software delivery.

Nedbank, in conjunction with Tangent Solutions, enables continuous quality software integration and delivery through the implementation of practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). This is resulting in faster resolution of problems, infrastructure and continuous monitoring and collaboration.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Business Challenge The biggest challenge for Nedbank is getting every single team to embrace the DevOps culture. As most processes are still done manually, employees face a certain level of job insecurity through the introduction of concepts such as infrastructure as code and continuous automation. Nedbank faces the following challenges:

• Lack of collaboration and communication between architecture, application, operation, development, and security teams
• No infrastructure as code
• No standards with regards to code quality and best practices
• No standards around infrastructure setup
• No automation within its infrastructure deployment
• Testing practices are not part of the development lifecycle

THE SOLUTION

Tangent Solutions is helping Nedbank employees to go through procedures of different tool-chains such as Jira, Bitbucket, MS Teams, Jenkins, and VSTS, amongst others. Tangent Solutions believes in the simplicity principle. The company simplified some of the continuous integration (CI) processes using XebiaLabs products by building python plugins that integrate with various systems. At the same time, there is continuous monitoring to track how many users are using different tools. Most importantly Tangent Solutions is assisting different teams within Nedbank to embrace the DevOps culture and enforce best practices for quality software delivery through TDD and BDD.

THE OUTCOME

A number of teams are starting to come to the party, embracing concepts such as CI, continuous delivery, TDD, BDD. Moreover, they understand that DevOps is not a practice, but a culture. Demonstrations and training is taking place within different Nedbank teams to ease adoption of aforementioned concepts. Tangent Solutions is anticipating assisting between 100 and 200 teams within Nedbank to take this DevOps journey in the first half of 2019.