How do you change the culture of a company? Axway’s own Vince Stammegna and Eric Labourdette answered this question and many more on software delivery and operational performance during their talk at GitLab Commit 2020 San Francisco.
The great energy kept attendees warm at the otherwise chilly SVN Center, where many technology leaders gathered to discuss the future of software development and learn from each other on how to accelerate software delivery.
The day was packed with inspiring talks across three tracks: innovation, cultural transformation and everything GitLab. By the end of the conference, we learned quite a lot from our peers in the industry and validated our direction, Axway’s Journey to the Cloud.
“We’ve changed how we deliver software. We’ve gone from quarterly or bi-annual releases to releasing multiple times per day. It is much more than the technology or process that makes the difference. Vigilance is required in any transformation. It is not a one-off project and this type of transformation requires many, many iterations over time. With each iteration, you have to learn and get better with each turn.”
GitLab Commit 2020
It was great to see examples of Agile practices and GitLab adopted within departments outside of R&D.
One talk demonstrated how a Marketing Director used GitLab to create and manage change to their copy within the context of Scrum. GitLab brought the entire framework to use Scrum and manage change for their marketing copy. It brought visibility and transparency into the team and that improved sharing and feedback. This strengthened trust and relationships within and outside of the team.
Continuous integration to continuous security and delivery
On our Journey to the Cloud, we’ve decided to keep CALMS during our transformation to a DevOps Culture. CALMS stands for Culture, Automation, Lean, Measure and Share.
In our presentation, we show how Axway:
- Automates for Continuous Delivery and drive towards Continuous Deployment
- Became Lean and drive a culture of continuous learning
- Measures DevOps and our Journey to the Cloud
- And, most importantly, how we Share
One example of learning to become leaner came in Q2 of 2019.
We had friction in the security review process for our microservices. Security defects emerged too late in the process. Our ISR and FSR were geared for quarterly delivery, however, product development was pushing for daily delivery.
This handoff between Dev and Security failed and caused our development teams to fix security and vulnerability defects for weeks before a service could get delivered. By seeking to understand before being understood, our product security team in collaboration with the Dev teams built a new process and a tool called the Continuous Security Review.
The tool sits within our CI process and allows Axway to shift security scanning left by performing the FSR scans on every build and deployment to Dev.
This was a critical improvement, learning from mistakes and eliminating the broken handoff. By exercising the CSR on every build, the process gets better and better. We had less false positives, continuous feedback, both teams happier by eliminating the handoff and working together as one.
Want to learn more about how Axway transformed into a DevOps culture on its Journey to the Cloud? .
Want to learn more about what Axway does? Check out the full interview with Stu at “The Cube.”
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