McAfee Web Services Team Saves $500,000 per year
by Adopting AccuRev for Agile Processes
Users and Environment
- Over 200 geographically distributed and offshore developers make up the Web Services team at McAfee.
- They are primarily .NET, ASP and SQL programmers.
- Locations include Sunnyvale, Calif.; Tokyo, Japan; Waterloo, Ont.; Ireland and India.
- Manage Software as a Service (SaaS) platform.
- Manage over 30 parallel development projects and multiple daily releases.
- Use Scrum-like Agile release process to manage over 300 releases per quarter.
AccuRev Success Highlights
- Web Services Team cost savings is approximately $500,000 per year.
- McAfee has increased throughput by 3x, successfully managing 30 parallel releases up from 10 with previous SCM tool.
- McAfee has saved time on every release, which is a time-to-market benefit providing increased revenue for the SaaS offering.
- Teams have moved to Scrum-like Agile development with multiple processes running concurrently inside AccuRev.
- AccuRev reduced numerous redundant process steps
- AccuRev simultaneously addressed McAfee’s source control, build management and release process.
- Over 200 developers made a seamless transition to AccuRev, with minimal training, while doing a major product release.
Customer Profile
McAfee, Inc. (NYSE: MFE), headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., is the world’s largest dedicated security technology company. It delivers proactive, proven solutions and services that secure systems and networks around the world, allowing users to browse and shop the Web securely. With its unmatched security expertise and commitment to innovation, McAfee empowers home users, businesses, the public sector and service providers by enabling them to comply with regulations, protect data, prevent disruptions, identify vulnerabilities, and continuously monitor and improve their security. http://www.mcafee.com.Background
McAfee was using Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (VSS) in a .NET environment. It proved increasingly difficult in this environment to manage a process with multiple daily releases, over 300 releases per quarter and 30 parallel development projects. The team determined that a process-centric software change and configuration management (SCCM) solution was required to manage the growing Web Services team, which consists of five geographically distributed locations throughout the world.The team’s process involves sprints of two months, one month and two weeks, in addition to emergency releases that can occur at any time in a given week. In addition, the move to an Agile and Scrum-like iterative software release process was perfect for the flexible, stream-based architecture of AccuRev.
“We made the transition from VSS to AccuRev during a product launch, and it took only a few hours. We didn’t run into a single issue, and the AccuRev training was painless. I had been concerned about the adoption rate for AccuRev among team members and how much support we would have to provide internally for people to learn AccuRev, but there were no significant issues.”
– Shailaja Shankar, SVP of Engineering
The Team
Over 200 geographically distributed and offshore developers make up the Web Services team at McAfee. The team is responsible for the SaaS (software as a service) or managed services platform, with eCommerce responsibilities on both the consumer and small business sides. There are .NET, ASP, SQL and a few Visual Basic programmers.Locations include Sunnyvale, Calif.; Tokyo, Japan; Waterloo, Ont.; Ireland and India.
Product Development Challenges
Parallel Development – Shailaja Shankar, SVP of Engineering, began hearing about too many file-merge and file-conflict issues from her developers and QA team, who were putting in heroic efforts just to limit their numbers. Multiple instances of VSS were created to limit the number of users utilizing the version control system at once. Multiple workarounds, and sandbox development which was not visible to anyone else severely limited the ability to do parallel development efficiently.
According to Ms. Shankar, among the biggest problems developers were running into was parallel development. Programs for the Web should be deployed as soon as they can be released, and this was not easily achievable with the previous SCM tool. Before AccuRev, they were running only 10-12 parallel projects at a time with great difficulty. Now they are efficiently running more than 30 multiple releases in parallel.
“ AccuRev has streamlined our Agile process beautifully, saving us at least a day of merges on the small projects and even more on the larger ones. This equates to approximately $500,000 in savings per year.”
Scrum-Like Agile Software Release Process – McAfee wasn’t trying just to solve a source code control problem, but also its build management and release process inefficiencies simultaneously. AccuRev easily integrated with the development team’s homegrown build tool, allowing McAfee to manage multiple build and development processes together, depending on the project and its length.
Version control, build management and release processes are all closely tied, and McAfee needed to address all three issues simultaneously. AccuRev allows the Web Services team to get organized around its Agile and Scrum-like iterative release management process, not just to fix the branching and merging process.
“ AccuRev takes care of the process, and developers no longer worry about how they are releasing code. Subsequently, they have more time for coding and designing the right solutions.”
Offshore Development – Visibility was hampered by spinning up local versions of source control, and adding new offshore developers to the system was difficult prior to AccuRev. Using AccuRev, McAfee easily added over 40 new offshore developers to the process. The AccuRev StreamBrowser GUI also provides the team with a clear idea as to where a specific project is within the SCM tool, regardless of geographic location.
“ The real benefit of AccuRev to the business is time to market. We are saving time on every release, and are more scalable in terms of the number of releases we are able to work on in parallel. We are able to make our dates and deliver quality releases, without requiring people to put in heroic efforts.”
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