DevOps.com

  • Latest
    • Articles
    • Features
    • Most Read
    • News
    • News Releases
  • Topics
    • AI
    • Continuous Delivery
    • Continuous Testing
    • Cloud
    • Culture
    • DevSecOps
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • Leadership Suite
    • DevOps Practice
    • ROELBOB
    • DevOps Toolbox
    • IT as Code
  • Videos/Podcasts
    • DevOps Chats
    • DevOps Unbound
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming
    • On-Demand Webinars
  • Library
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • On-Demand Events
  • Sponsored Communities
    • AWS Community Hub
    • CloudBees
    • IT as Code
    • Rocket on DevOps.com
    • Traceable on DevOps.com
    • Quali on DevOps.com
  • Related Sites
    • Techstrong Group
    • Container Journal
    • Security Boulevard
    • Techstrong Research
    • DevOps Chat
    • DevOps Dozen
    • DevOps TV
    • Digital Anarchist
  • Media Kit
  • About
  • AI
  • Cloud
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Continuous Testing
  • DevSecOps
  • DevOps Onramp
  • Practices
  • ROELBOB
  • Low-Code/No-Code
  • IT as Code
  • More
    • Application Performance Management/Monitoring
    • Culture
    • Enterprise DevOps

Home » Blogs » Doin' DevOps » Acorns Turns Sluggish FiServ on its Head with DevOps

Acorns Turns Sluggish FiServ on its Head with DevOps

By: Chris Riley on November 3, 2014 Leave a Comment

Modern investment tools are popping up all over the place. Not only are they shifting the power from large institutions to the consumer, they are applying modern technology to a red-tape laden world.

Recent Posts By Chris Riley
  • Using Incident Response for Continuous Testing
  • What Is Resilience Engineering?
  • Moving from NOC to the SRE Model
More from Chris Riley
Related Posts
  • Acorns Turns Sluggish FiServ on its Head with DevOps
  • Blockchain: A Threat to DevOps—and How Engineers Can Respond
  • How I Bet on DevOps – and Won
    Related Categories
  • Blogs
  • Doin' DevOps
    Related Topics
  • acorns
  • devops
  • enterprise
  • fiserv
  • regulated
Show more
Show less

CloudNativeDay 2022

You can put FiServ technology in one of two categories: older institutions forced to build modern applications to compete, and financial techies using modern applications to solve real world financial problems in a new way.

Acorns, a new mobile investment application, is the latter. Backed by a strong investment group and strategy, they are bringing “elite” investing to everyone.

What They Do

Acorns automates participation in complex fund management by leveraging the round-up model. The app connects to a designated bank account, rounds those transactions up to the nearest whole dollar and then invests that small difference in stocks and mutual funds. Each buy is a fraction of a larger collective buy and is diversified based on the user’s risk tolerance. This is a truly unique way to invest that would take thousands of dollars to buy into otherwise.

Of course, what makes Acorns a slam-dunk is an awesome application front end. Without a great user experience and quality back-end transactions, Acorns would not have a business. Their iOS and Android apps, and soon-to-be-released web application, give a great first impression and establish an ongoing, positive relationship with the user.

In order to make sure the app performs as expected and keeps up with consumer demands, Acorns’ team has adopted the culture of DevOps. One could argue they put as much effort into ensuring top-notch application quality and experience as they do into their investment strategies.

Why I picked them

Acorns’ success is possible because of a culture first, tooling second mentality. Many organizations believe a tool will fix the problem and guide the process. But the team behind Acorns knew better. They were deliberate about building their corporate culture, deciding to focus on collaboration between QA, front end dev, operations and the back end team from day one.

Introducing and embedding DevOps into this particular business was challenging. Because they are in a regulated industry and must maintain a large number of separate applications and a transaction volume that would humble most application developers, they are left with the most complex Dev shop you can imagine.

The demands of FCC data collection and filing alone are intense. Often regulation is a good excuse to maintain the status quo, but not for the team at Acorns. Every transaction, and any and all external communication with users, must satisfy finance law precisely which means the QA team not only has to watch functionality but compliance as well. And they have to do this across the mobile applications, consumer-facing web application, internal trading platform, customer service portal and a scalable back end. Plus, since the business is all about transactions, in addition to a great user interface, they need to execute quickly and accurately making optimum buys for the user with optimum user experience.

Not many organizations can claim such complexity with such a small team, but Acorns executes better than any large financial institution I’ve ever seen.

How They Do It

Tying their corporate culture together is the standard agile principles, build labels, epics, scrums, etc. More importantly, everyone feels open to sharing what is going well and what is not because all departments have the same two goals: great customer experience and quality transactions. This is a simple idea with a big impact—an organizational structure where all departments have equal value. At Acorns, you won’t find one department’s objectives taking precedence over another.

Acorns team also practices continuous integration of their mobile application allowing them to catch and address issues quickly. Using Xamarin Test Cloud for their test runs on physical devices makes it a lot easier.

While continuous delivery is a desire, they are—as all mobile applications are—dependent on application store approvals and launch processes. They also need to validate their front ends with back end trading platforms which they do on a bi-weekly basis. While they may increase that frequency, at this point they’ve made the decision to stick with bi-weekly validations.

When Acorns first launched, and after the big Tech Crunch flood, they saw a tremendous increase in sign-ups that put pressure on both the back and front ends. But because a great communication system was already in place, they were able to respond to performance demands within two days. Infrastructure scaled to meet demands without a huge disruption on development, ops or QA.

With a DevOps culture flourishing, they have ample opportunity to embrace tools to increase productivity like BrowserStack for a functional testing browser grid, Litmus for customer e-mail testing, Atlatsian’s Jira for ticketing and workflow and many more.

What We Can Learn

The first thing we learn from Acorns is that implementing DevOps is possible, no matter how large or complex your operations is. Sometimes DevOps is brushed off as an immature practice that may or may not work, but at Acorns we see it’s not just hype. Their success is an example of DevOps working in a highly regulated and scaled environment.

We also learn that organizational structure is important. You can’t have a successful DevOps culture without having it dialed in top down. Unfortunately, this is how many teams with the best of intentions fall back into bad habits. A new organization like Acorns does have a better chance at success, but no matter how new the organization bad habits are always hard to break. They continue to reinforce the culture and reap the benefits as they grow.

With an unparalleled user experience, Acorns is sticking it to the older financial institutions and showing them what bottom-up software development can do. And they are leveraging the culture and tools of DevOps to make it all happen.

Filed Under: Blogs, Doin' DevOps Tagged With: acorns, devops, enterprise, fiserv, regulated

Sponsored Content
Featured eBook
The State of Open Source Vulnerabilities 2020

The State of Open Source Vulnerabilities 2020

Open source components have become an integral part of today’s software applications — it’s impossible to keep up with the hectic pace of release cycles without them. As open source usage continues to grow, so does the number of eyes focused on open source security research, resulting in a record-breaking ... Read More
« How to Enhance DevOps by Supporting the Work of the Build-Release Engineer
Microsoft determined not to get left behind by DevOps »

TechStrong TV – Live

Click full-screen to enable volume control
Watch latest episodes and shows

Upcoming Webinars

VSM, an Ideal Framework for Continuous Security Dashboards
Wednesday, August 10, 2022 - 11:00 am EDT
LIVE WORKSHOP - Accelerate Software Delivery With Value Stream Mapping
Wednesday, August 10, 2022 - 1:00 pm EDT
10 steps to continuous performance testing in DevOps
Thursday, August 11, 2022 - 3:00 pm EDT

Latest from DevOps.com

GitHub Brings 2FA to JavaScript Package Manager
August 9, 2022 | Mike Vizard
CREST Defines Quality Verification Standard for AppSec Testing
August 9, 2022 | Mike Vizard
IBM Unveils Simulation Tool for Attacking SCM Platforms
August 9, 2022 | Mike Vizard
Tech Workers Struggle With Hybrid IT Complexity
August 9, 2022 | Brandon Shopp
Open Standards Are Key For Realizing Observability
August 9, 2022 | Bill Doerrfeld

Get The Top Stories of the Week

  • View DevOps.com Privacy Policy
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Download Free eBook

DevOps: Mastering the Human Element
DevOps: Mastering the Human Element

Most Read on DevOps.com

Recession! DevOps Hiring Freeze | Data Centers Suck (Power) ...
August 4, 2022 | Richi Jennings
Palo Alto Networks Extends Checkov Tool for Securing Infrast...
August 3, 2022 | Mike Vizard
Developer-led Landscape & 2022 Outlook
August 3, 2022 | Alan Shimel
Orgs Struggle to Get App Modernization Right
August 4, 2022 | Mike Vizard
GitHub Adds Tools to Simplify Management of Software Develop...
August 4, 2022 | Mike Vizard

On-Demand Webinars

DevOps.com Webinar ReplaysDevOps.com Webinar Replays
  • Home
  • About DevOps.com
  • Meet our Authors
  • Write for DevOps.com
  • Media Kit
  • Sponsor Info
  • Copyright
  • TOS
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Techstrong Group, Inc.

© 2022 ·Techstrong Group, Inc.All rights reserved.