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Cobiscorp leverages DevOps to transform Fondo Nacional del Ahorro

October 19, 2021

Fondo Nacional del Ahorro (FNA) or National Savings Fund is a government-owned commercial and industrial company in Colombia that was established in 1968. Over more than 50 years its mission has been to contribute to the welfare of Colombians, managing the unemployment benefits and savings (cesantías) of Colombians and providing funds for educational and housing credits. For example, the FNA granted 11,800 housing loans and $2.8 billion in relief to 72,000 families in 2020.

Cobiscorp is a leading Americas-based multinational company that creates IT solutions for financial institutions. More than 70 financial institutions currently use the company’s solutions in 15 countries, including leading regional banks, and the subsidiaries of large North American and European banks.

Project Details

Cobiscorp used its DevOps expertise at Fondo Nacional del Ahorro to help the institution with the automation of legacy software for compiling and generating artefacts from old software components and many deprecated ones, whose future functionality was in doubt. The project was rolled out in October 2019 with the pilot going into production in May 2020.

Implementation Plan

The DevOps implementation project had to overcome major challenges such as migration of the back-end source code, middleware, and front-end in ‘big bang’ mode without affecting ongoing or future developments and operation implementation of continuous integration. The team also had to ensure continuous deployment in new technologies and in dealing with the legacy software.

The project was initially composed of an architecture team in charge of the research, proof of concept, definition, guidelines, and general process documentation. After this, engineers were added to implement the project, initially in person and in later stages remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Cobiscorp also deployed its In-house software to automate the source code migration from TFSVC to GIT and automatically compiled proprietary components into the different software layers.

The project’s most visible objectives were to reduce the error rate in manual installations to zero, reduce software installation times from hours to minutes, and retrain and restructure the engineering teams in other relevant areas. This generated a positive impact on the development cycle times and added knowledge to the different development teams. It was planned and developed under the agile SAFE methodology with features, user stories, and deliverables every two weeks (1 sprint).

Implementation Cycle

The architecture team thought about the need to adapt to change from a technical point of view, supported by the infrastructure and automation strategy. These strategies were essential as the client had different technologies. The change process needed to be flexible both to maintain and improve current technologies and to support future technologies in the short and medium-term.

The horizontal axis was focused on two important pillars, the theoretical and practical training on new tools for the development teams, the stakeholders of the process, and using a centralized application lifecycle management (ALM) tool to have centralized DevOps implementation and make the technical automation processes intuitive.

The Cobiscorp team started from a high-level design strategy and proof of concept on the vertical axis, which set the direction of the implementation towards the development teams, who, already trained, achieved a natural transition in the automation scheme work environment. In this way, Cobiscorp created a strong foundation and a change management model with minimal impact, making architectural decisions and defining a clear design, working as a team in the implementation, and involving everyone, an essential aspect of the success of the project.

DevOps and Agile Deployment:

The project was implemented using an agile methodology (SAFE) to showcase results early in the process. Using this methodology, Cobiscorp was able to show progress in the general work plan, making deliveries quickly and efficiently every two weeks (sprints).

After carefully evaluating processes and dependencies, decisions were made about the activities that gave the most value, visualizing changes, and results quickly and continuously. In this way, it began with the identification, installation, and verification of technical requirements, training for development teams in the use of tools, modification of processes, and above all the change of culture that implies eliminating manual processes that had been deeply rooted for years both in the company and as a client. Changes were then made at the source code level with continuous integration.

Customer impact

The DevOps project positively and directly impacted the entire development cycle, from coding to peer review, building and delivering working software to the customer. The team working on DevOps delivered the smaller pieces of software every 2 weeks and exponentially reduced installation times, by hours or even days.

Cobiscorp ensured great quality control, right from the source code, doing manual peer review and static source code analysis automatically. This helped to reduce installation errors to zero. Post the program client did not require a team of 5 or more engineers to attend tickets and to do operational installation tasks through manuals. These teams were redeployed to other activities giving additional value to the construction of software. Cobiscorp also removed the use of different tool licenses to support the manual process and transformed tools that complied with the process in an agile and automatic way.

IBSI View

This successful DevOps project changed the software development cycle, generating precise and concrete responsibilities in various roles. It provided an order to the governance of source code to the entire software cycle’s quality. It advanced a cultural change in development and automation processes, thus highlighting the benefits of DevOps.

Key Facts

Bank: Fondo Nacional del Ahorro
Bank Headquarters: Bogotá, Colombia
Solution partner: CobisCorp
Timeline: 8 months project with go-live in May 2020

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