telco

Engagement

The engagement was to reduce the number of Production Problems and ensure the Billing Application met Service Level.

An analysis of over 200 Problem Records assigned to Operations Support concluded that the problems fell into 4 categories: -

Ø Lack of testing

Ø No identifiable System Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

Ø Code Regression (this had caused a Major Production outage)

Ø A big gap between Testing and Production

Solution

A generic (all platform) System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) was agreed with the Developers, Application Support and Service Delivery containing the following Stages : -

DEVelopment à SYStem Test à ACCeptance à PRODuction

Existing environments were re-used and new environments were designed, built and tested to facilitate the SDLC.
The process of code migration was defined with Entry and Exit Criteria between Stages.
The process was 'underpinned' with Software Configuration Management (SCM)
The main Billing System was ‘dismantled’ and 'rebuilt' identifying common code and using a consistent approach to compiler options and load module linking.

The success was measurable in the dramatic reduction in problems and no code related problems at all. The environment strategy led to the creation of additional streams to facilitate 'parallel' development - not possible without SCM.

The environment builds were repeatable, the Operations Acceptance environment was a 'copy' of Production and could have been used for Disaster Recovery.

Over a period of time all existing applications were loaded into the SCM toolset.

The methodology and process was used as a model for other platforms with excellent results.