Case study: How a major European bank used BlueOptima to achieve a 35% productivity boost and $10k per developer cost reduction in Agile.

Developer Analytics Case Study: Europe’s largest Universal Banks Agile transformation

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Developer Analytics Case Study: Turning a Challenging Agile Transformation into a Success

Introduction

Software development has become a core component for many industries and choosing digital agility has become increasingly important for serving customers in the fastest way. Agile is the ability to create and respond to change rapidly.

Agile software development consists of various iterative and incremental approaches to software development. Under these approaches, requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organising, cross-functional teams with their end-users.

A Case for Agile

A discipline of Agile is continuous improvement. A plan for improving Agile adoption while increasing software development productivity is achieved by measuring the health of an organisation's Agile transformation.

One of Europe’s largest Universal Banks discovered this after it began an Agile adoption to improve the delivery of digital services when customer demands grew for more online transactions. Two years into their Agile transformation, it was becoming a challenge to enable continuous deployment to meet customer needs. Software development features were not being delivered on time, under budget, or with the expected quality.

To succeed in its Agile mission, the Universal Bank needed to discover a way to measure the health of its Agile transformation, to improve Agile adoption and increase software development productivity. The CTO needed help to understand what practices could be slowing their transformation and the reasons why.

A three-year strategic plan was put into place for the IT department with a focus on flexibility and stability with every product deployment. The IT department adopted Agile principles with DevOps (Development and Operations) best practices. The aim was to improve engineering teams' ability to respond to customer needs and accelerate time to market.

The Universal Bank’s IT department used iteration burndown charts and individual hours per iteration per week to measure the success of individual Agile projects. Despite this, they were struggling to improve their software delivery.

The CTO had remarked when reflecting on the Agile adoption:

“We aim to follow a customer-centric approach with the goal to better flexibility and stability with every product deployment. Since adopting Agile, our goal has not been met. We were using Agile, but we didn’t have team level transparency to make sure our teams were comfortably transitioning from old practices to adopting Agile practices.”

To increase efficiency, the CTO and Technical Leads set the following objectives:

BlueOptima’s Approach

The CTO became aware of BlueOptima’s Developer Analytics and decided to go ahead with a limited rollout at two of their locations in Europe. BlueOptima’s Developer Analytics platform provides data-driven insights to improve software development efficiency.

At the beginning of the rollout, Developer Analytics was used to provide the CTO with objective insights into how their source code was changing over time, and analyse the impact on engineering teams' productivity. We measured their current Agile approach to provide insight into their teams’ adoption of Agile, highlighting which teams were excelling working in an Agile manner, which teams were not successfully transitioning, and which projects were most affected.

This observation gave them a better understanding of current performance levels and allowed them to plan what performance level they wanted to achieve. They were able to formulate a plan to restore their Agile transformation. The CTO and Technical Leads were able to set realistic goals for what could be achieved, including the engineering teams in critical need.

Productivity Trends Before Rollout

A snapshot of the productivity trends of the Universal Bank’s Agile transformation before the BlueOptima limited rollout began shows that their engineering teams were at 1.36 Avg. BCE/Day.

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‍Caption: Billable Coding Effort Distribution (%) showing an Avg. BCE/Day of 1.36 before the limited rollout began. The majority of development resources were underutilised, with a small number of developers delivering the bulk of the source code change.

During the Universal Bank’s rollout of Developer Analytics, the CTO and Technical Leads were able to identify which Agile processes were incorrectly implemented among their teams that were negatively impacting the transformation. They were able to adjust their approach and improve the productivity of their engineering teams.

Productivity Trends After Optimization

BlueOptima helped them notice a big shift in productivity distribution. They were able to see an increased number of developers moving to higher BCE/Day.

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‍Caption: Billable Coding Effort Distribution (%) showing a 35% increase in BCE/Day, reaching 1.83 BCE/Day.

Custom Reports and Agile Best-Practices

The Universal Bank wanted to further explore agile practices that would benefit their engineering teams. The CTO decided to opt for BlueOptima’s Data Science package. BlueOptima’s Data Science team collaborated with the Universal Bank to create custom reports to indicate the Universal Bank’s performance against Agile best-practices.

Sprint Overview on a Team Level

A key metric in determining the success of an Agile transformation is sprint duration. BlueOptima’s Data Science team provided quick, actionable insights with a snapshot of completed sprint activities by engineering teams. Technical Leads analysed sprint-on-sprint productivity to understand the reasons behind the impact on their engineering teams' productivity. Therefore, the bank improved and optimised future sprints.

Sprint Overview on an Individual Level

A comprehensive view of all major tasks engineering teams completed during a sprint was provided. Technical leads were able to identify if context switching between tasks was impacting individual developer’s productivity. The shapes in the chart represent different task types undertaken by individual developers, with the Coding Effort invested reflected in the size of the shapes.

Conclusion

An Agile transformation for this major Universal Bank was a worthwhile investment. They saw noticeable improvements in their engineering teams’ productivity with an increased number of developers moving to higher BCE/Day. The engineering teams achieved a 35% increase in BCE/Day, reaching 1.83 BCE/Day.

Key Outcomes:

Background on Metrics

BlueOptima analyses the intellectual effort software developers invest when delivering source code changes. Historical revisions are analysed to produce an objective benchmark called Coding Effort.

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