Vodafone UK and Amdocs win Computing’s Best DevOps Team excellence award

...and “the best example of such a unit working like clockwork with developers, operations and other key stakeholders working in harmony” by winning the Best DevOps Team award at Computing’s gala awards dinner in London.

Computing's DevOps Excellence Awards showcase outstanding achievements from organizations, personalities and solutions across the industry that have successfully applied DevOps methodologies. However this is even more difficult to do in the communications industry which has one of the world’s most dynamic, and complicated operational environments.

Why DevOps doesn’t get more challenging than this

This Vodafone UK and Amdocs DevOps team designs and builds connectivity products for the most challenging side of this domain: enterprise customers, including many critical large-scale UK institutions such as the National Health Service.

Developing workflows for enterprise products is very complex, with a massive range of development requirements involved when building a dedicated communications network between different sites for huge corporates. Enterprise products need hundreds of tasks built into the workflow, and each has many unique features and attributes.

Two companies, one team

Vodafone and Amdocs established a hybrid center of excellence with a cross-functional team located in the UK and India to successfully support enterprise’s complicated development requirements. Instead of local Scrum teams working in the same site, both companies (regardless of location) work as a single team under a single Scrum master, along with business stakeholders.

Uniquely, we have several projects running in parallel, each developed by a different Scrum team, and with team members from both companies under a single Scrum master. These projects are then merged, delivered, and deployed as a single release – and it works, with outstanding results.

The award-winning process

Developers, designers, and business stakeholders work closely together as the product is built – from requirement-gathering, product-mapping, design, to development and delivery. By working as a single team regardless of location or company, this gives us the speed we want right from the start.

An iterative approach was mutually agreed, working towards regular releases in Sprint cycles using a CI/CD deployment process. This includes regular check-in of code, and automated deployment and testing. This finely-tuned process includes retrospectives and reviews at the end of iterations, ensuring that any risk is mitigated before it’s too late.

DevOp approaches keep evolving

“The benefits of DevOps are widely recognized across the industry,” notes Computing. “But implementing the workflows and, just as importantly, culture, is still a sticking point. Approaches to DevOps continue to evolve. Beyond bringing dev and ops teams together, it's also now about delivering value to customers, recognizing the human aspect of collaboration and communication, and realizing how DevOps can enhance areas of the business beyond traditional tech teams.”