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Barclays: Think Agile, think DevOps

How best in class technology and employee skills are transforming risk calculation across the Bank.

At Barclays, we believe in delivering growth through customer centricity. To transform customer experience and to create proficient products that help in Wholesale Credit Risk calculations for Corporate and Investment Banking (CIB); the Risk, Finance & Treasury (RFT): Wholesale Credit Risk (Axis) team has fostered an environment capable of responding and adapting to changes being brought by global regulatory programmes every year.

Axis, an application suite that works on Basel III guidelines and Regulatory programmes, builds regulatory reporting engines that are easily deployable, scalable and robust. These solutions help us accurately and effectively calculate wholesale credit risk within a short span of time.

Additionally, through one-click rollout of the product releases and ‘Ship faster’ approach, we have established a highly efficient and customer centric development model.

Using lightweight project management framework with broad applicability for managing and controlling iterative and incremental projects, the Wholesale Credit Risk: Axis team has been able to:

  • Release incremental product versions every two weeks.
  • Automate builds (c5minutes), package (c55 seconds) and deploy (c8 minutes) process, thus eliminating dependencies on geographically distributed, dedicated release teams for non-production environments.
  • Run 1000+ automated tests over each feature of the entire product in a continuous fashion ensuring product stability and eliminating the requirement of a dedicated test team.
  • Include users as part of the software development cycle via feature discussions thus making it an ideal platform for prioritisation, planning and delivery.
  • Quickly create simulated test environments, for investigative analysis.
  • Integrate software code analysis tools providing a health metrics for the product by depicting aspects such as code coverage (90.9 %), complexities and technical/refactoring debt (nearly 15 minutes) Vulnerabilities (0%).
  • Collaborate with optimised agile processes ensuring an effective delivery plan, execution and faster delivery of software features.
  • Automate checks and validation on enterprise code managements system preventing self-inflicted damages.

Our DevOps transformation has been a journey, not a jump. Throughout this journey there have been a series of milestones, and each one of those has taken the team a step closer to being service oriented, customer centric and be more agile.