Client background

Client: Leading US department store chain

Industry: Retail

Products or Services: Clothing, shoes, toys, home décor, appliances and electronics

Areas of operations: Worldwide

Challenges

The client has a complex DevOps platform that constitutes multiple OS variants (Windows & Linux) that hosts both IT and business applications. Their testing lifecycle was very lengthy and thus, needed a solution to improve cadence.

There was an urgent need for comprehensive assurance that the application changes work seamlessly with infrastructure upgrade. The client had small teams, headed by different leaders, concentrating on ad hoc requirements. A standard governance process was missing, which often led to performance degrade issues post OS upgrading.

Solution

Wipro set up a Quality Center of Excellence to validate end-to-end infrastructure and application testing. A DevTOps environment was developed to resolve the issues post OS upgrade. This was made possible by bringing the entire project under one leadership and thus resolving any issues of multiple directions.

Solution highlights

• Continuous testing in DevOps environment
• Infra & app readiness (patch validations) was introduced for quality assurance post upgrade through application and infrastructure automation
• Production readiness was enabled before the applications  go-live to make sure the service ( Application + Infra)  is stable and reliable
• Made continuous incremental deployments and validated the deployments by adopting Canary testing method (Testing incremental and small changes on a non-prod environment )

Business Impact

Single ownership and combined accountability of applications and infrastructure led to easier management of the whole process. The integration of quality assurance and operations reduced the operational expenditure for testing by 25%.

Benefit highlights:

• End-to-end validations (App + Infra integration) ensured high resiliency, thereby reducing business downtime by about 20%​
• Enabled the client to scale to 1 patch (App or Infra) release per week which was originally 1 patch (App or Infra) release per month​

“The move from the legacy testing approach to the integrated App + Infra testing model, led to a dramatic improvement in operations. We were able to cut down OPEX by 25%.”

- Harish Krishnan, General Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Services, Wipro