SoftwareOne case study

Standardisation helps SoftwareOne developers to work more efficiently

To better serve its customers around the world, SoftwareOne set out to improve how its developers work by providing them with a more consistent and standardised set of modern tools.

With 17 delivery centres around the globe, SoftwareOne can provide application services to business customers around the clock, no matter where those customers are located. But it realised that it could deliver those services even more efficiently by consolidating the tools that its developers use into a single platform.

Starting in 2023, SoftwareOne launched a project to identify the best developer tools for its application services teams to use, standardise its platforms and move everyone onto a common toolset.

>20%
improvement in developer efficiency
Best practices
through a modern and standardised set of tools across delivery centres
New capabilities
for AI-aided coding, code review and advanced security

Client: SoftwareOne
Industry: Information technology, Security
Services: Application Services
Country: Germany, Poland, Spain, Bulgaria

Seeking consistency for developers across delivery centres

SoftwareOne’s developers often collaborate across borders and different delivery centres when they work on projects for clients. But they sometimes encountered challenges because teams in different centres relied on different development tools and platforms. Before one project got under way, for example, SoftwareOne had to organise training sessions to get everybody on the same page – because developers in Germany, Poland and Spain used Azure DevOps to manage the software development lifecycle, while colleagues in Bulgaria used Atlassian’s Jira.

These kinds of hurdles meant that SoftwareOne had to invest time and money on internal skill-building before it could begin work on some projects. It also meant that some of its developers depended on proprietary, rather than cloud-agnostic, tools for their work. To improve efficiency and build its market position with clients that used a wide range of platforms, SoftwareOne decided to bring all of its application services developers onto a common set of tools.

“One of the goals of this consistency was to share resources across the different delivery centres,” says William Villamil, Global Technical Governance Lead and Head of Engineering at SoftwareOne. “So if you have a software developer in Spain, we can use that software developer in Germany.” This would not only make it easier for SoftwareOne to use its talent wherever it was needed, but would reduce training costs and related expenses.

So SoftwareOne set out in 2023 to adopt a standard toolset across its application services delivery centres in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Migrating to enable faster, more reliable code development

The first step was for SoftwareOne to identify which developer tools should be included in the company’s standard toolset. It started by talking with the service delivery leads at each delivery centre and asking them about their teams’ needs and expectations and which features were most important for the tools they used. After defining the list of potential tools for adoption, SoftwareOne then conducted a comparative analysis of each one, assessing factors that included functionality, costs, training requirements and more.

After analysing all of the options, SoftwareOne had a list of preferred tools: GitHub Enterprise for source code management and the Atlassian suite, including Jira for application lifecycle management and Confluence for team collaboration. It also decided to begin adoption of GitHub Copilot for AI-assisted coding.

The next step was to begin the process of actually moving SoftwareOne’s developers to these tools. After resolving the licensing issues, SoftwareOne began configuring the new platforms and moving developers to the preferred toolset, starting with GitHub and then moving on to Jira. This involved migrating the code repositories stored on various platforms by different delivery centres to GitHub, one project and one team at a time. Because some of the delivery centres already used GitHub, this process affected mostly teams in Bulgaria, Germany, Poland and Spain. As this was going on, SoftwareOne also held several training sessions to prepare teams to use the new tools and designated a champion at each delivery centre to help manage the migration.

To further support developers, SoftwareOne also implemented an internal development platform called Backstage. Designed to enhance innovation and improve collaboration and the development experience, Backstage acts like a dashboard that developers can use to view current projects, code repositories, metrics and more. It also standardises naming conventions and how teams are created at the start of every project.

In one case, SoftwareOne discovered that there was no readily available tool to migrate attachments in Jira, so it created its own tool and scripts to manage that.

One of the goals of this consistency was to share resources across the different delivery centres.

William Villamil

Global Technical Governance Lead and Head of Engineering, SoftwareOne

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As it migrated each repository, SoftwareOne had communication templates ready to keep clients updated if the move showed signs of directly impacting a client project. Outside of a handful of clients, though, that wasn’t needed. Almost every phase of the migration was completed without any noticeable effects on projects, and each SoftwareOne development team was able to switch over to the updated toolsets within just a day or two of migration.

The migration project started with GitHub in July 2023, with the Jira implementation beginning the following month. By March 2024, all developers across all of the delivery centres were using the updated tools. Since then, SoftwareOne has gradually been rolling out GitHub Copilot to more developers and has also been working to further strengthen its toolset by deploying GitHub Advanced Security and SonarCloud for code review.

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User experience is ‘so good,’ while GitHub Copilot builds knowledge

SoftwareOne’s developers have been overwhelmingly positive about the new tools, says Villamil. “They are very happy with GitHub because it is a tool created by developers, for developers. The user experience of that platform is so good. In general, developers and architects feel happy with the tool, that they are more efficient, and that we as a company are providing good tools for them. They are also comfortable with the use of Jira and Confluence.”

Out of a total of 800 developers, around 300 were using GitHub Copilot as of September 2024 and SoftwareOne plans to have almost all of them using Copilot by the end of 2025. Copilot AI is proving useful by providing developers with coding suggestions, which helps to both improve efficiency and build developers’ programming knowledge, Villamil says. Developers can choose whether or not to use Copilot’s suggestions, and the SonarCloud automated coding review tool ensures that all code meets requirements for quality, reliability, maintainability and best practices.

SoftwareOne’s goal is to have all the code it produces for clients reviewed using SonarCloud by the end of 2025. And as it continues moving ahead with enabling GitHub Advanced Security, it expects to be able to provide clients with even greater assurance that code is reliable and free of vulnerabilities.

It estimates that these improvements have helped to boost the efficiency of its developer services by more than 20%.

Another ongoing effort is to continue rolling out Backstage, which SoftwareOne is using to introduce an internal dashboard that development teams can use to further improve collaboration.

They are very happy with GitHub because it is a tool created by developers, for developers. The user experience of that platform is so good.

William Villamil

Global Technical Governance Lead and Head of Engineering, SoftwareOne

Along with improved efficiency, reliability and security, SoftwareOne has also found that it’s gaining new and unexpected benefits from greater reusability of its code repositories. With all of its developers now using the same set of tools, sharing internal code across delivery centres has become easier than ever. Villamil says SoftwareOne now has more than two times as many code repositories as before on GitHub, because developers have found the platform to be useful for sharing and reusing code.

“They’re using it to share the components that they create or to share the reference architectures that they have created,” Villamil says. “Now we have a lot of repositories with reusable assets that we can consider in new projects. It certainly improves efficiencies in projects.”

Today, SoftwareOne has unified the toolset used across delivery centres, providing more than 1,000 staff members with a consistent and reliable experience built on common standards and best practices. This has helped to improve collaboration and communication, enabling the company to deliver projects for its clients more efficiently and cost-effectively than ever.