Improving Quality and Delivery with Agile & DevOps
Our team helped a large bank move from 8-week to 2-week release cycles in key lines of business by adopting Agile and DevOps practices.
Overview
Rising competition and new technology have made it necessary for enterprises to release new updates and features in their applications and platforms more often. To respond faster to market changes, regulatory updates, and evolving user needs, teams need to keep quality, reliability, and security consistent while cutting release cycles and operational overhead.
However, for large enterprises with highly federated IT structures, this speed is often hard to achieve. Lean software practices, Agile, and DevOps can help support faster releases. One of our leading clients, a large bank, was facing exactly this issue. Let’s see how the DivIniSoft team helped them by adopting Agile and DevOps practices.
Challenges
Operating within a large, federated IT environment, the bank found it increasingly difficult to meet business expectations for speed, stability, and cost efficiency. The lack of standardized Agile and DevOps processes led to the following challenges:
- Slow and inflexible release cycles: traditional delivery models made it hard to release new features quickly or respond to changing business and regulatory requirements.
- Siloed development and operations teams: limited collaboration between the teams led to handoff delays, misaligned priorities, and a longer time to production.
- Quality issues found late in the lifecycle: testing and validation happened late in the process, which led to rework, production incidents, and reduced service reliability.
- Rising operational and maintenance costs: a lack of automation and standardization increased the effort spent on routine tasks, incident management, and post-release fixes.
Together, these challenges affected people, processes, and technology. The teams struggled to deliver within rigid models, the process did not have the flexibility needed for faster releases, and the systems remained isolated and fragmented.
Our Strategy
To address these challenges as a whole, a unified Agile and DevOps transformation strategy was defined. It would break down silos, standardize delivery practices, and create a scalable model that could be adopted across the bank’s federated IT landscape.
The strategy was simple. It started with a maturity assessment to create the transformation roadmap using Agile Scrum and Kanban. The teams were then coached and reorganized into cross-functional, product-aligned teams, and DevOps practices were put in place with a CI/CD pipeline.
Our Solution
The transformation was executed through a phased and structured implementation plan, with the following phases.
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01
Agile & DevOps Maturity Assessment and Transformation Roadmap
Our team carried out a comprehensive maturity assessment of the existing systems, team collaboration, tools, and delivery processes. Our experts identified the capability gaps and areas for improvement. Based on this, we defined a phased transformation roadmap with clear priorities, timelines, and measurable outcomes.
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02
Forming High-Performance Agile Teams
We provided dedicated Agile coaching so that employees adopted consistent ways of working, and formed multiple Agile Scrum teams. In some teams, where Scrum did not make sense, we adopted Kanban instead. Overall, we built mature Agile teams that were ready to take on the challenges.
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03
Streamlining Change and Release Management Using Lean Practices
We reviewed the change and release management processes and simplified them using lean principles. Our team focused on reducing manual tasks such as approvals, redundant handoffs, and process bottlenecks, and automated them to make releases faster and more predictable. At the same time, we made sure the required governance and compliance controls were maintained.
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04
Orchestration of DevOps Practices and Automation
Our DevOps team orchestrated end-to-end DevOps practices across the delivery lifecycle, including build automation, continuous integration, QA automation, and automated release and deployment pipelines. We used a standardized approach, with the flexibility to support multiple technologies, including Java, .NET, big data platforms, and selected COTS products.
Business Outcomes
- Accelerated release cycles from 8 weeks to 2 weeks in key lines of business.
- Improved service quality and reliability by 35%.
- Embedded Agile delivery maturity in the teams.
Tech Stack
Conclusion
With a standardized implementation of Agile and DevOps tools and practices, the bank was able to address long-standing delivery challenges across its federated IT landscape. The process modernization, team enablement, and delivery automation led to faster release cycles, better service reliability, and stronger alignment between technology and business goals.
Our team can help your organization make this kind of transformation, so your teams can respond more effectively to changing market and regulatory demands.