A European telco
Telco enhances backlog management, code quality, throughput, and efficiency by replacing Jira with OpenText™ ALM Octane Enterprise
About the company
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Population covered:7+ million
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Internet speed:up to 10 Gbit/s
Summary
Challenges
- Aimed to increase speed and agility in service delivery.
- Wanted to enable faster innovation through agile software practices.
- Struggled to optimize software lifecycle due to lack of visibility.
Solution
- Migrated to a DevOps-capable solution.
- Connected user stories with software artifacts.
Results
Increased visibility of status in software lifecycle
Enabled agile backlog management
Identified defects earlier to reduce costs
Challenges
- Faced with growing competition in the domestic market, aimed to increase agility and speed in tailoring services to customer needs
- Wanted to adopt an agile software delivery model that would enable faster innovation and higher quality
- Lack of visibility into testing and defect resolution made it difficult to optimize software lifecycle management activities
As the largest privately-held telco in its home country, this company continues to grow by creating innovative, high-quality services tailored to the needs of its consumer and business customers. With new competitors emerging, the company must ensure that it can build and rapidly evolve information systems capable of supporting both its internal initiatives and its customers. It manages many applications, some on a daily release schedule, ranging from customer-facing ‘My Account’ pages, to middleware and back-end CRM and ERP solutions.
The telco had been using OpenText™ ALM/Quality Center to govern application lifecycle management. As the company looked to adopt a more agile software delivery model, it realized in 2021 that the existing ALM platform was no longer the best fit for its requirements.
“We wanted to shift left in testing and development, to improve speed, efficiency and the quality of code,” said a company spokesperson. “We already had some CI/CD [continuous integration/continuous delivery] pipelines in Jira and Jenkins, but we were missing the full connection to our user stories and defects. We wanted to see the code commits against the user stories, and to have traceability of business requirements throughout the software delivery cycle.”
Thanks to the use of shared components, we don’t need to recreate all of the releases or redefine all of the workflows for a new project – we very much appreciate this enhancement.
Solution
To accelerate its adoption of agile DevOps practices, the telco migrated to OpenText ALM Octane, which provides a single source of the truth for all aspects of software lifecycle management.
Products deployed
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OpenText™ ALM Octane Enterprise
Equip teams and toolchains to deliver high-quality software with insight, traceability, end-to-end visibility, and continuous quality
Migrating to a DevOps-capable solution
Within just two months in 2021, the telco completed the full data migration for its defects, requirements, and testing modules. “Thanks to our preparations, in collaboration with OpenText, and the ease of use of ALM Octane, the migration was a great success,” said the spokesperson. “We have a mix of on-site and off-shore developers and testers: transparent communication is key to the success of our distributed agile team.”
Connecting user stories with software artifacts
In the two years since its migration to ALM Octane, the telco has made use of all the solution’s functionality, including requirements, issue, quality, dashboard, pipeline, and team backlog. With team backlog, the company can rapidly document business needs and map them to supporting artifacts in the software development lifecycle. Each team is then assigned a sprint velocity, which determines the overall release capacity and creates optimized work plans.
The spokesperson said, “Our team especially likes the social aspects of the team backlog module: they can communicate via Microsoft Teams, which makes their lives really easy.”
The telco captures business requirements in Confluence and pushes them into the Octane backlog functionality. Developers enter information on software defects directly into ALM Octane for tracking.
Shifting left with ALM Octane means that we can find and fix more defects earlier in the cycle. This improves the quality of code delivered into the later stages of testing, and naturally it also increases efficiency and reduces costs.
Results
Since its migration to OpenText ALM Octane, the telco continues to benefit from enhanced team collaboration, improved productivity, higher code quality and throughput, and better visibility of status throughout the software lifecycle.
Increased visibility of status
With ALM Octane, the telco can more easily see consistent, accurate information on the status of its software development and testing activities. “We hold a daily meeting to monitor testing and defect progress, and to manage the overall number of defects,” said the spokesperson. “ALM Octane really facilitates this with a great dashboard to drill into individual defect status. The clear information keeps our meetings focused and positive.”
Acting as a single source of the truth for all information associated with the software lifecycle, ALM Octane enables managers to work faster and more efficiently, basing their decisions on accurate real-time information.
The telco uses customized trackers built in ALM Octane to monitor risk, open issues, and releases. “Whenever a team needs to go live, they create a tracker in which they collect and manage all of the relevant information on the release, the testing, the demo, and the business sign-off,” said the spokesperson. “We ask them to link all of those back to the user stories, so that we can ensure every user story has corresponding test coverage.”
Enabled agile backlog management
Following the initial migration, the telco upgraded to ALM Octane Enterprise, gaining the ability to create shared spaces for teams.
“The agile teams who participate in delivery on a day-to-day basis have been moved into our main shared workspace and are working on a common backlog,” said the spokesperson. “Thanks to the use of shared components, we don’t need to recreate all of the releases or redefine all of the workflows for a new project – we very much appreciate this enhancement. Users report a streamlined process with fewer clicks, and a helpful user-friendly GUI. ALM Octane itself is fast, with intuitive search and easy navigation between modules.”
Started decommissioning of Jira
The telco continues to move away from Jira, targeting the complete decommissioning of that solution so that only Octane will be used for the entire applications life cycle management to improve traceability and increase standardization. The organization expects to achieve cost savings by reducing its Jira licensing footprint.
Usage of ALM Octane has grown at the telco, and the company started using the ALM Octane Developer component as part of its broader shift-left strategy. This component is dedicated for developers whose main use case for ALM Octane is to review and fix software defects. “Using the Developer component, we enable better collaboration between developers and other stakeholders, which increases the visibility of the overall process,” said the spokesperson. “The Developer component also makes it easier to fix defects earlier in the cycle as part of our shift-left strategy.”
Identified defects earlier to reduce costs
As the telco continues its DevOps and CI/CD transformation journey, the ability to build significant automation into ALM Octane is a major benefit. “Nearly the whole lifecycle of each defect is automated through the workflow items in ALM Octane,” said the spokesperson. “This automation enables teams to work faster and in a more streamlined way.”
ALM Octane also helps the telco to improve quality by including gates in the CI/CD pipeline. New code can only be moved to the next stage if it has passed the appropriate security and unit testing, which has resulted in the delivery of cleaner code with fewer defects.
“Shifting left with ALM Octane means that we can find and fix more defects earlier in the cycle,” said the spokesperson. “This improves the quality of code delivered into the later stages of testing, and naturally it also increases efficiency and reduces costs. It is much more cost-effective to resolve a bug in the early stages. It’s a huge advantage to have the defects managed in one system. Our source of truth about events in the software lifecycle is ALM Octane, which gives us the connection we were missing between user stories and defects. We now have the ability to trace business requirements all the way through to delivery in software.”
