Santander Brazil

Overcoming barriers to innovation

With new challengers entering the market at a rapid pace, the heat is on for established banks to ensure that their products and services are competitive and deliver true value to customers. With over 19 million digital banking customers, Santander Brazil is already harnessing the power of technology to enhance its products and services. The bank’s dedicated software developers work around-the-clock to deliver the latest banking innovations to customers.

Giovanni Alves da Silva, IT Analyst at Santander Brazil, comments: “The key to our success is our ability to deliver new products and services quickly from online and mobile banking applications to back-end services. To accelerate the design and delivery of new applications and features, we decided to encourage our software development team to adopt agile methodologies.”

For many years, Santander Brazil relied on OpenText™ ALM/Quality Center integrated with Jira Software to support the development, testing, and deployment of new applications. While these tools delivered excellent results for traditional development projects, the bank wanted to improve its support for agile workflows too.

Yuri Gregorio do Couto, senior IT analyst at Santander Brazil, says: “One of the core challenges we faced was visibility. We had lots of different teams using our tools in slightly different ways. The lack of standardization made it difficult to find and fix bugs. What’s more, when a developer identified a bug, they had to manually create a new story in Jira creating additional work and taking time away from other important development tasks.”

Because Octane is much faster than the previous solution our development teams are able to work much more efficiently. Moreover, with Octane providing detailed workflow visibility, developers no longer need to wait for approvals before they can take on new tasks. Ultimately, these efficiency improvements reduce the time required to complete and deliver new projects.

Exploring the power of ALM Octane

To accelerate the delivery of new products and services, Santander Brazil looked for a solution that could streamline agile workflows. Impressed with its experience of ALM/Quality Center, the bank embarked on a pilot of OpenText ALM Octane an integrated DevOps planning and management tool designed with agile methodologies in mind.

Alves da Silva explains: “We first considered expanding our use of Jira by adopting Zephyr, but we would have needed to set up and manage an additional server, and it would have limited our options for enhancing our workflows. Instead, we decided to test the much more powerful functionality available in ALM Octane for optimizing and redesigning our development processes.”

During the pilot, Santander Brazil integrated OpenText ALM Octane with its mobile application testing solution based on OpenText™ UFT Digital Lab as well as its existing Jenkins (CloudBees) and Jira solutions for automated testing. After a three-month trial, the feedback from users was extremely positive.

Gregorio do Couto comments: “ALM Octane offered so many ways for us to identify and execute process improvements and standardizations across the development pipeline. Moreover, it offered much faster performance, so we decided to roll out the solution to other teams in our development department.”

Today, OpenText ALM Octane supports over 500 projects and 1,000 workspaces, and the solution is used by over 2,600 people in Santander Brazil every day.

Alves da Silva explains: “We received excellent support from Micro Focus (now OpenText™) throughout the implementation, which lead to us completing a total rollout in under six months—including the pilot phase. Micro Focus (now OpenText) went above and beyond to build a great partnership; they were always on hand to help us with issues and provided rapid responses to any questions that came up during the project.”

With ALM Octane we are well-equipped for agile working; it integrates end-to-end processes and helps us to keep workflows involving multiple teams running smoothly.

Staying ahead in a competitive market

Having transformed its software development capabilities by moving from waterfall to agile practices, Santander recognized that its existing quality-management approaches also needed to be updated. By implementing OpenText ALM Octane, the bank has achieved alignment between its tools and its agile methodology, gaining a much clearer and more complete view of the quality of software releases to internal clients. Today, every pipeline is rigorously tracked and monitored in OpenText ALM Octane, and software must pass through every quality gate in Octane in order to be approved for production.

Alves da Silva says: “With ALM Octane we are well-equipped for agile working; it integrates end-to-end processes and helps us to keep workflows involving multiple teams running smoothly. What’s more, every story created in Jira automatically synchronizes with the Micro Focus (now OpenText) solution. As a result, we can quickly and easily identify the source of any coding issues, run root-cause analysis, and ensure that all teams have fast access to the information they need to resolve any bugs and move projects onto the next phase of development.”

Gregorio do Couto adds: “Because Octane is much faster than the previous solution, our development teams are able to work much more efficiently. Moreover, with Octane providing detailed pipeline visibility, developers no longer need to wait for approvals before they can take on new tasks. Ultimately, these efficiency improvements reduce the time required to complete and deliver new projects. And because achieving a fast time-to-market is so important to keep customers using our products and services, delivering new features and applications faster helps to strengthen our competitive position in the Brazilian banking sector.”

Currently, Santander Brazil is using OpenText ALM Octane to monitor and manage ongoing projects by tracking their performance across a range of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which will automatically feed into the OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) solution.

“Once we’ve finalized our KPI dashboards, we will have a much clearer, more accurate view of how each and every project is progressing,” says Alves da Silva. “For instance, we will be able to view how many bugs there are for each project, or for each deployment. With much greater insight, we will be able to prioritize agile sprints and manage software development, testing, and deployment cycles much more efficiently, ensuring that everything we do adds value to the business.”

Gregorio do Couto says: “Brazil represents the largest IT footprint for Santander globally, and we also have the greatest regulatory complexity to manage. The successes we’ve achieved with  ALM Octane have been noticed by other banking subsidiaries in Santander: we are seen as the internal reference for transformation to agile practices, and we hope that we can inspire and help teams in other regions to reap the same benefits in the future.”