Big 4 Firm Builds its DevOps Capabilities to Bring Tax App Features to Market Faster
Overview
A Big Four accounting firm wanted to speed up the development of a complex tax reporting and analysis application that is used both internally and by clients. The firm intended to increase its DevOps capabilities in order to improve communication and collaboration between teams, accelerate production and decrease development timelines.
Challenge
Due to the complexity of the application and the volume of enhancements, fixes and new features the firm wanted to bring to market quickly, the company sought out DevOps experts with enough experience to hit the ground running. Finding the right skill sets, expertise and experience proved challenging in the relatively new DevOps field.
The Solution
As part of a larger engagement that includes development and SRE, the firm tapped Softensity’s pool of DevOps engineers to provide the level of expertise the app required. Beyond the depth of knowledge and experience that Softensity’s engineers bring to the engagement, the teams’ locations around the world allow for an extended development window. Softensity’s experienced team was able to start quickly without requiring a lengthy onboarding process.
Softensity’s DevOps team is responsible for developing the pipelines, infrastructure and resources required to speed up development. The engineers support the full software lifecycle, including infrastructure, provisioning and security. The team collaborates closely with Development, Ops and QA teams to ensure that everything flows through a single pipeline environment.
Tasks and stories include fast-paced app creation, updates, modifications and improvements using the full range of the Azure Cloud DevOps stack. This requires collaboration with various scrum teams on a range of sprints to ensure speed, efficiency and quality. The team also applies DevSecOps tools to all pipelines to ensure security.
In addition to building pipelines and automating various tasks, Softensity’s DevOps team also trains internal teams so they can create and self-service their own pipelines. This training and support includes phone calls and remote screen sharing sessions to walk through various processes.
The Results
Softensity’s engineers have helped grow and mature the firm’s DevOps capabilities to significantly speed up the release of new applications. Increasing time to market has been accomplished by automating numerous manual tasks and bringing once-siloed teams together for more efficient collaboration. As a result, it has become faster and easier to complete a deployment at any level for development or production. Building on the success of the collaboration, the firm continues to expand its DevOps capabilities with plans to add additional Softensity engineers to its team.