OpenText trusts OpenText
Software company drinks its own champagne, deploying OpenText™ Core Software Delivery Platform to replace Jira and other third-party tools
About OpenText
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Founded in:1991
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Employees:23,000
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Customers:120,000+
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Footprint:180 countries
Summary
Challenges
- Multiple third-party tools meant no clear view of the software lifecycle.
- A lack of tool standardization reduced efficiency.
- Limited toolchain and value stream integration impacted security.
Solution
- Migrated to a single environment.
- Kept software delivery on track.
- Enhanced the solution based on user feedback.
- Enabled a fully secured software pipeline.
Results
Gained a comprehensive view 
Improved quality
Protected data and cut costs
Challenges
- No clear view of the software development lifecycle
- Lack of standardized tools
- Limited delivery toolchain and value stream integration
Serving some of the world’s largest enterprises and government organizations, OpenText is strongly committed to speed, quality, and security throughout the software lifecycle.
However, as we acquired other software businesses, we inherited their diverse software lifecycle management systems. In addition to being inefficient and costly, the multiplicity of toolsets and approaches made it hard to maintain visibility and ensure standardization.
We set out to deploy a single, comprehensive platform that would enable us to embrace quality management across the whole lifecycle.
John Postma, VP of developer experience, said, “We wanted to get all 7,000 of our software engineers onto the same system to enable consistent visibility and reporting. Most of the company used Jira, which is great at what it does, but we wanted to go beyond agile planning and defect management.”
Yaniv Sayers, ADM chief architect, said, “It's harder for managers to get visibility of status when you have a plethora of tools and processes. This also makes it more challenging to integrate your delivery toolchain with the rest of your value stream.”
By modernizing and standardizing the delivery toolchain through the adoption of an end-to-end software delivery platform, we expected to reduce costs, increase efficiency, strengthen security, and—above all—boost quality.
In the existing environment, each development group had its own preferred tools and processes for managing source code, backlog, testing, release, and so on. The flexibility this provided came at the cost of requiring teams to integrate and maintain their own tooling and to validate its security. Our highly skilled DevOps engineers were therefore distracted from their core tasks, and in many cases the toolchains were becoming outdated and misaligned with security and compliance policies. The variety of approaches also made it more difficult for engineers to switch between projects since each move might require them to learn new tools and processes from scratch.
“True quality management is hard to implement because you need to cover many topics: planning, deployment status, testing, patch management, portfolio backlog, security, and so on,” said Postma. “Just as large companies require an ERP rather than an array of siloed systems, we needed a single, end-to-end solution for ensuring software quality.”
Inspired by the notion of an ERP-like solution for software lifecycle management, we believed that we could deploy our own software to replace Jira and other third-party tools.
Holger Rode, R&D manager developer experience, said: “Another driver of our modernization project was the opportunity to evaluate our own solutions in a large enterprise setting to get direct insight into what they did well, what was missing and how to enhance them.”
Just as large companies require an ERP rather than an array of siloed systems, we needed a single, end-to-end solution for ensuring software quality.
Solution
To monitor and manage quality throughout the software lifecycle, we replaced third-party tools with OpenText Core Software Delivery Platform—enabling greater standardization, better visibility and control, enhanced security, and easier automation.
Products deployed
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OpenText™ Core Software Delivery Platform
Maximize value, reduce risk, and speed delivery with end-to-end DevOps
Migrating to a single environment
We took a phased agile approach to the migration, running ten waves of around 400 users at a time. In each case, the team migrated the existing environment and ran validation exercises while developers continued to use Jira. Following multiple rounds of feedback, the team ran the migration script again to capture interim changes and moved the developers across, switching Jira to read-only access.
“A major change of tooling can never be completely non-disruptive,” said Rode. “To minimize the impact, we used a small group of internal champions to validate each migration wave.”
Keeping software delivery on track
In total, we migrated around five million records and more than 10 million comments from Jira. OpenText Core Software Delivery Platform (SDP) is now used by all software engineering teams in the company, with the 4,000 migrated users joining 3,000 existing users.
“We refined our approach over time,” said Postma. “We completed the migration within a year, with no interruption to quarterly releases and no roadmap changes for any of our hundreds of software products.”
We are now working to implement other elements of software lifecycle management into our OpenText Core SDP environment, including planning, test automation, strategic portfolio management, and release governance.
Enhancing the solution
During the migration, we found that existing Jira users were making extensive use of comments. However, at that time, it was not possible to search within comments in OpenText Core SDP. To avoid potential disruption, we updated the product to include the missing functionality.
“This is why we are pursuing a strategy of ‘OpenText trusts OpenText’,” said Rode. “Based on our own experience and internal feedback, we can enhance our products for the benefit of all users.”
Enabling a fully secured software pipeline
As a supplier to governments and enterprises in regulated industries, we are highly conscious of the need for evidence-based security within software development. To make it easier to manage security throughout the software lifecycle, we replaced a variety of solutions with a set of OpenText security tools, integrating them with our instance of OpenText Core SDP.
The four key tools are OpenText Static Application Security Testing (SAST), OpenText Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST), OpenText Core Software Composition Analysis, and OpenText Core Open Source Select.
“We now have a single consistent interface to parse the results of multiple security scans,” said Postma. “Audited security findings from OpenText DAST and OpenText SAST then feed directly into defect management in OpenText Core SDP.”
OpenText requires all developers who contribute code to any project to be certified on the secure development principles set out by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). We are now using OpenText Core SDP to easily confirm that our developers are up to date with their OWASP secure coding certifications, which should give our customers added peace of mind.
With all OpenText developers using the same processes and tools, it is far quicker and easier to verify compliance with security standards. Dan Nolan, Director developer experience, said, “We can now automate compliance checks, which would have been impossible when the information was spread across 50 different tools.”
Postma added: “Visibility is a big benefit. Having proof that things were done correctly is extremely important for us and our customers. We know what evidence customers want to see for compliance purposes, and we have push-of-a-button reports to present that information.”
“A significant security defect at OpenText could cripple the company,” said Nolan. “This centralized security scanning is our first line of defense against that.”
Another driver of our modernization project was the opportunity was to evaluate our own solutions in a large enterprise setting, to get direct insight into what they did well, what was missing, and how to enhance them.
Results
Replacing Jira with OpenText Core SDP has given us a single system of insight into the complete software development lifecycle. The solution enables end-to-end quality management, provides consistency, and embeds security for all 7,000 engineers.
Gained a comprehensive view of the software development lifecycle
We now have a single system of insight into everything that happens in software development, from planning to development to testing to feedback.
Following the lift-and-shift of Jira users into OpenText Core SDP, we can now expose all developers to additional quality management, test management, test automation, and other functionalities. “This is where the major benefits will accrue, empowering our people to reduce risk while delivering faster and with higher quality, all on a single platform,” said Sayers.
“Having OpenText Core SDP as a consistent, standardized, unified solution gives us the capability to ask new kinds of questions and to think about new quality measures,” added Postma. “We can apply the same models across everything rather than having to duplicate effort. For example, our current focus is automation. With all engineering teams on the same platform, any automation effort benefits every product line equally.”
Improved quality
Receiving new releases of OpenText Core SDP two weeks before all other customers effectively positions our 7,000 OpenText developers as beta testers. While receiving the benefits of new functionality first, the internal team can also quickly identify and help fix any issues, providing more assurance to customers.
“We drive all the feedback from our internal users back to the product team, enhancing, fixing, and only then release to external customers,” said Sayers. “This reduces risk and improves the quality and credibility of the product.”
The migration itself provided valuable information about how to migrate rapidly and with minimal disruption from Jira to OpenText Core SDP. We’ve baked all those learnings back into the product itself. “We provide migration tools as part of the product, and every learning, every enhancement, every requirement that we identify is being productized,” added Sayers.
“Our goal with OpenText Core SDP was not necessarily to make development faster, but to achieve better quality,” said Postma. “And that is as important today as speed, especially in our industry.”
Protected data and cut costs
As a software company, we naturally consider our backlog and quality management to be highly sensitive and private.
“From the security perspective, adopting OpenText Core SDP has made things much cleaner,” said Sayers. “We no longer have unknown integrations between tools, and we can comply more easily with regulations around data retention and privacy. The solution really gives us control of our primary intellectual property: our software.”
Beyond fully integrated processes, end-to-end visibility and enhanced controls, we directly benefit from eliminating the cost of Jira and other third-party tools. These savings will contribute to our CIO’s targeted $1B savings over ten years from the deployment of OpenText products.
Finally, the successful completion of this enormous migration challenge ahead of schedule has given a real confidence boost to the whole company. Yaniv Sayers, ADM chief architect, said: “The developer community within OpenText is really enthusiastic about using our own products because it’s a great way to validate our work and demonstrate to customers that we’re confident in the quality of our work. On a personal level, it’s pretty motivating to be able to proudly use your own tools!”
