Embracing Agility with an Effective Deployment Pipeline: The Story of SPAR e-Commerce

Speaking at the DevOps Enterprise Summit SPAR presented on: “Embracing Agility with an Effective Deployment Pipeline”.

The talk was delivered by:

• Max Ehammer – Enterprise Architect for Software Development and Integration – SPAR Business Services GMbH.
• David Jungwirth – Senior Director – Digital Advisory at Enterprise Studio – HCL Technologies.

With 84,000 employees in 3,000 brick-and-mortar stores contributing to the success of the SPAR Austria brand, increasing competition from native on-line retailers was the catalyst that dramatically increased the pressure on SPAR to succeed.

To accelerate its transformation, SPAR’s Information and Communication Systems group turned to Enterprise Studio by HCL to assess automation opportunities and provide enterprise agile coaching.

SPAR asked Enterprise Studio to “automate everything” in the shift to agile. Over time, with numerous sprints and PIs, Enterprise Studio helped implement a fully integrated development factory, embracing the grass-roots strengths of IT with all teams working in unison to become more responsive to business needs.

What happened next?

SPAR e-Commerce shops moved from error-prone, chaotic, manual efforts towards streamlined software development, a 100% increase in release frequency, a 99% reduction in deployment time, and near-zero error rates. Today, SPAR rolls out high-quality feature-toggle releases, provisions in-house IaaS systems on-demand, and releases hot fixes with zero downtime to production.

Starting with a catalytic event—great pressure on IT and big ambitions—SPAR combined small steps toward agile and DevOps with a collaborative client/vendor approach to achieve more creativity, greater innovation and better engagement between IT and business stakeholders.