Client background

• Client name or descriptor: American insurance company
• Industry: Insurance
• Products or Services: Auto insurance
• Geography or areas of operations: USA
• Number of customers: Over 16 million customers
• Total annual revenue: More than USD 25 billion

Challenges

The client had 240+ builds with manual execution of custom PowerShell scripts along with TFS on a daily basis. The client was using TFS 2015 version and maintaining 10-15 Servers. To reduce the cost and for better availability, they decided to migrate to SaaS i.e. Azure DevOps.

The client also wanted to reduce the dependency on other tools like JIRA which was mainly used for project and bug management through Azure DevOps. They wanted to incorporate CICD for automation and utilize the full capability of Azure DevOps. It was a major challenge for migration due to a total of 3,500 developers and hundreds of projects. Migrating all projects in one go was seen as a risk.

Solution

A comprehensive solution was provided by Wipro in the form of a Build & Release Management system:

• Wipro implemented custom DevOps Catalog (Dashboard and CM) and TFS Pipeline to Improve Build & Release. We also built Self-Service for DB Changes in non-production servers.
• To migrate from TFS to Azure DevOps, Wipro put together standards, guidelines, and best practices around Azure DevOps. It used Trunk Based Development and implemented CICD processes through GIT Repo short-lived branches.
• Wipro is part of the migration team, created by the client that ensures a smooth transition for application teams while migrating to Azure DevOps.
• Extensive work went into evaluating custom processes and templates in the existing TFS instance in order to standardize the work flows and processes within the Azure DevOps standard templates.
• Wipro is part of implementing tools like migration of source code from TFVC to GIT (including history), automated migration of Work Items from TFS to Azure DevOps and from JIRA to Azure DevOps. Wipro is also part of implementing extensions which can be used as part of an automated CICD pipeline.
• Wipro also designed Reusable Task and Stage templates to automate the CICD Process across the enterprise and made it a Self Service Solution.

Business impact

Multiple benefits were observed through Pilot Implementations:

• 6 Business Groups with each group consisting of 40+ builds getting deployed in around 12 environments.
• Cycle time for deploying brought down to 1 hour per environment through CICD pipeline.
• Dev team was able to promote the code fix/new features to production in 3 weeks cadence.
• Reduced duration for Code migration of a large project to TFVC –GIT - New average was 40 minutes compared to the 5 hours it took earlier
• Reduced duration for Work Item migration from TFVC to GIT using automated script -8 – 10 hours(5000 work items) compared to 10 days it took through using an excel sheet manually.

“Wipro simplified and accelerated the DevOps process for the client and moved the Development, Testing and Ops team from TFS to Azure DevOps in order to provide better capabilities to the client. Azure DevOps, combined with people and processes, has enabled the client to continually provide value to customers.”

- Venkata Guru Prasad Kandarpi, Global Head for Microsoft Application Services, Wipro