Standardisation helps SoftwareOne developers to work more efficiently

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.

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.