QA Financial Forum Chicago | 9 April 2024 | BOOK TICKETS
Search
Close this search box.

BBVA introduces ‘DevOps-as-a-Service’

timmeny-brian-photo-face-1569418122

“BBVA has taken a few runs at DevOps in the past. But back then the focus was on agility and culture, and we weren’t able to fully get there from an engineering perspective,” Brian Timmeny, Head of DevOps and Engineering Processes at BBVA, told QA Financial.  Since joining the Spanish multinational banking group in 2016, Timmeny has led BBVA’s DevOps transformation, both in terms of DevOps and driving change across the bank’s sixteen geographies. Timmeny’s focus has been to scale the culture of DevOps and agility and introduce a central suite of reusable DevOps implementation tools, including global code repositories and pipelines, bringing DevOps-as-a-Service to the organisation. “Having a readily available suite of tools globally available gives teams two things: one, a low friction way to adopt these toolsets; and two, it gives them the ability to drive dependency management and truly create global applications, which at the end of the day was the original driver for the programme,” he said. The transformation aims to drive velocity and quality into the application development lifecycle. “As a multinational organisation, we should be leveraging the globality that we have and reusing our capabilities, rather than reinventing applications that are strikingly similar across multiple geographies,” added Brian. But consistency comes with its challenges. Products do have characteristics that are global, but they also have characteristics that are local, explained Brian. “There is always that healthy tension between creating a global system of implementation and being able to adopt to the needs of the local. The key is to provide teams with the ability to store code in a common way, create CI/CD in a common way, and test in a common way. These are things that we can give to the organisation and then debate around the edges about those product nuances over time.”

Next-generation testing 

A major aspect of the BBVA DevOps journey has been the introduction of a global test suite, which is still in its early stages. In order to drive the idea of next-generation testing, the team first established several testing stages – unit testing,  integrated testing, security testing and performance testing to name a few – as well as identified those pilots and programmes which would most likely benefit from global testing technologies. But this project has brought to light a whole new set of challenges. Timmeny pointed out that although when working with the next generation of technologies – written in Java and Node, etc. – it’s easier to create common testing capabilities, when dealing with tech that has to integrate with legacy systems or hosts that are not common across geographies, testing plans need to be much more individualistic. “However, the manner in which we create these testing plans and link together what was legacy and what is new technology is something that we can leverage across the globe. And once we have built and established these tools, we can look to create reusability across the organisation – then we will start to get this concept of a global testing capability,” he added.

Seeing through the strategy

“Eight times out of ten most teams want to adopt a DevOps lifecycle to improve quality, speed and feedback loops,” explained Timmeny. “But the most important thing is to prioritise. You can’t drive an effective programme by doing everything all at once.” By strategically building out a DevOps infrastructure, eventually it will encompass all components. Once objectives are clear, true dashboarding and automated metrics against these objectives can be put in place, forcing a targeted vision that really achieves the benefits of DevOps, he added. Brian Timmeny will be a keynote speaker at the QA Financial Forum Chicago 2018. He will be discussing how organizations should attack security testing, how to reduce risk through vendor management, and best practice surrounding the cloud and open-source tools. The event will be taking place at the Metropolitan Club on April 25th. To see the full agenda, click here.