McAfee web service team saves 500,000 per year by adopting Micro Focus AccuRev for Agile processes.
“AccuRev has streamlined our Agile process beautifully, saving us at least a day of merges on the small projects and even more on the larger ones. This equates to approximately $500,000 in savings per year.”
SHAILAJA SHANKAR
SVP of Engineering
McAfee
Computer Services
United States
McAfee, Inc. (NYSE: MFE), headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is the world’s largest dedicated security technology company. It delivers proactive, proven solutions and services that secure systems and networks around the world, allowing users to browse and shop the web securely. With its unmatched security expertise and commitment to innovation, McAfee empowers home users, businesses, the public sector and service providers by enabling them to comply with regulations, protect data, prevent disruptions, identify vulnerabilities, and continuously monitor and improve their security.
McAfee was using Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS) in a .NET environment. It proved increasingly difficult in this environment to manage a process with multiple daily releases, over 300 releases per quarter and 30 parallel development projects. The team determined that a process-centric software change and configuration management (SCCM) solution was required to manage the growing Web Services team, which consists of five geographically distributed locations throughout the world. The team’s process involves sprints of two months, one month and two weeks, in addition to emergency releases that can occur at any time in a given week. In addition, the move to an Agile and Scrum-like iterative software release process was perfect for the flexible, stream-based architecture of AccuRev.
Over 200 geographically distributed and offshore developers make up the Web Services team at McAfee. The team is responsible for the SaaS (software-as-a-service) or managed services platform, with eCommerce responsibilities on both the consumer and small business sides. There are .NET, ASP, SQL and a few Visual Basic programmers.
Shailaja Shankar, SVP of Engineering, began hearing about too many file-merge and file conflict issues from her developers and QA team, whom were putting in heroic efforts just to limit their numbers. Multiple instances of VSS were created to limit the number of users utilizing the version-control system at once. Multiple workarounds and sandbox development, which was not visible to anyone else, severely limited the ability to do parallel development efficiently.
According to Ms. Shankar, among the biggest problems developers were running into was parallel development. Programs for the Web should be deployed as soon as they can be released, and this was not easily achievable with the previous SCM tool. Before AccuRev, they were running only 10-12 parallel projects at a time with great difficulty. Now they are efficiently running more than 30 multiple releases in parallel.
McAfee wasn’t trying just to solve a source code control problem, but also its build management, and release process inefficiencies simultaneously. AccuRev easily integrated with the development team’s homegrown build tool, allowing McAfee to manage multiple build and development processes together, depending on the project and its length. Version control, build management, and release processes are all closely tied, and McAfee needed to address all three issues simultaneously. AccuRev allows the Web Services team to get organized around its Agile and Scrum-like iterative release management process, not just to fix the branching and merging process.
Visibility was hampered by spinning up local versions of source control, and adding new offshore developers to the system was difficult prior to AccuRev. Using AccuRev, McAfee easily added over 40 new offshore developers to the process. The AccuRev StreamBrowser GUI also provides the team with a clear idea as to where a specific project is within the SCM tool, regardless of geographic location.