An energy supplier with a large contingent of software developers sought to enhance its software delivery by addressing the disarray in its tooling.
The company identified tool sprawl as a significant hindrance, impacting the efficiency of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
Challenges of Tool Proliferation
The proliferation of tools across the organization was causing several issues:
- Increased costs: Independent tool procurement by different teams resulted in redundant expenses.
- Reduced productivity: The varied tool landscape created a challenging learning environment, increasing cognitive load on engineers.
- Limited control: Lack of standardization made it difficult to enforce consistent software delivery practices, complicating change management.
- Visibility gaps: Scattered tools limited insights into essential metrics like engineering efficiency and software quality.
To resolve these issues, the company decided to implement a standardized toolset across all development teams, enlisting RiverSafe for assistance.
RiverSafe's Solution
RiverSafe collaborated with the company to transition from a fragmented toolset to an enterprise-level standardized platform.
This solution included accessible repositories, security scanning capabilities, and testing tools, made available across all engineering teams.
- Standardized Tooling: Ensuring all teams use the same authorized tools simplified tool accessibility and eased the onboarding process for new engineers.
- Improved Data Visibility: Centralized tools enabled comprehensive data gathering, allowing business leaders to monitor engineering metrics, identify bottlenecks, and evaluate DevOps maturity.
- Streamlined Processes: A unified platform allowed for the implementation of uniform processes, such as an improved pull request approval system, enhancing product quality and governance.
Benefits and Results
The transition to a standardized toolset has yielded numerous benefits for the company, including:
- Cost Savings: By reducing duplicate licenses and streamlining the toolset, the company now saves approximately £4 million annually.
- Enhanced Performance: Complete visibility into engineering processes has allowed for fine-tuning and improved productivity, where engineers can focus on software development.
- Lowered Change Costs: A single pipeline model simplifies future upgrades and reduces change management costs.
- Informed Decision-Making: Centralized data enables informed decisions about tool retention and has curtailed internal debates over tool preferences.
- Data-Driven Insights: Full practice visibility allows the company to evaluate engineering maturity and strategize resource allocation effectively.
As a pioneering energy supplier with a large software development practice, the client was spinning a lot of plates. Looking to streamline its software delivery process, the company targeted tooling as a potential area for improvement.
With a huge number of software engineers working across the organization, tool sprawl had become a major issue. Tool proliferation was creating several challenges that were slowing down the SDLC, including:
- Increased costs: Each team was paying for tools independently, leading to duplicated expenses and unnecessary costs.
- Reduced productivity: The disorderly range of tools created a steep and unpredictable learning curve for engineers, adding to their cognitive load and impacting productivity.
- Limited control: Without standardization, the company found it difficult to enforce software delivery practices, resulting in a higher cost-of-change and complex implementation.
- Visibility gaps: Dispersed tools meant limited insight into overall engineering efficiency, software quality, and other key performance indicators.
To address these issues, the company sought to roll out a standardized, simplified toolset for all development teams and reached out to RiverSafe for support.
The solution
RiverSafe worked with the organization to move them from a decentralised, multi-tool environment to a standardized, enterprise-level toolset.
This new, cohesive platform featured accessible repositories, security scanning tools, and testing tools—all of which were made available across every engineering team.
Key elements of the solution included:
- Standardized tooling across teams: By standardising the toolset, the organization can ensure that all teams are using the same set of approved tools. This also makes tools more accessible and user-friendly, and helps new engineers get up to speed with tools quickly.
- Better data visibility: These newly centralised tools allow the organization to gather comprehensive data, allowing business leaders to closely monitor engineering performance metrics. This enhanced visibility means teams can now analyse lead times from code commits to production, identify bottlenecks, and gain insight into the maturity of their DevOps practices.
- Streamlined processes and governance: With a unified platform, the organization can introduce uniform standards for processes to improve its products—a new pull request approval process, for example, began improving code quality immediately. Being able to implement these standards at the enterprise level, as opposed to among individual teams, has simplified change management and reduced governance challenges.
The results
The standardization effort has already brought significant benefits to the company and its engineering teams, including:
- Cost savings: By eliminating licenses and reducing the need for multiple tools, the company now saves around £4 million every year. The streamlined toolset has also reduced spending on maintenance and duplication of other costs.
- Improved engineering performance: With full visibility into engineering processes and clearer performance data, the organization has been able to identify opportunities for improvement and fine-tune processes. By reducing tool sprawl, engineers can now focus on developing software instead of adapting to or switching between different tools, reducing workload and boosting their productivity.
- Reduced change costs: By consolidating all pipelines into one tool, the organization minimised the complexity of future upgrades. With a single pipeline model, changes can now be rolled out at one central point rather than across multiple tools, lowering the cost of engineering efforts.
- More informed decision-making: Having access to a centralised source of data means the company can make informed decisions about which tools to retain or retire. The standardized approach has also eliminated time-sucking “tool holy wars,” where team members would promote the use of their preferred tools, as the choice is made at the organizational level.
- Data-driven insights: Achieving full visibility into their practice has empowered the organization to measure engineering maturity and pinpoint improvement areas. Leadership can now assess metrics like commit lead times and engineer performance so they can make smarter decisions about resource allocation and planning.
