When you think of large vehicles, chances are you think heavy-duty front and rear axles, suspensions and cab parts. When you think of large engines, chances are you think crankshafts, cylinder heads, pistons and injectors. When you think of the brains behind a company that produces all this, you should think software and the processes that create it.
Swedish automotive company Scania was building its software intelligence using large, legacy development approaches, coding entire software packages as a single project. The organization’s teams were couched in silos. Releases were highly infrequent.
Everything changed when Scania scaled and conquered the partitions and divisions that separated teams and adopted agile practices and DevOps.
Scania and its Software
Scania, a large global maker of heavy transport buses and trucks and marine and industrial engines, runs many software departments. Its Connected Services department creates web-based portals, APIs and embedded software that transmits live and historical data transmitted to and from drivers and vehicles for logistics including positioning, tracking, service planning, geofencing and messaging.
Scania’s move toward DevOps accelerated in the 2012-2013 time frame, when the company combined developers and testers into feature teams and molded its first DevOps practices. The company had a host of development issues before that.
“Before 2012, we were organized around traditional big software projects, which slowed progress and hindered communication. We had long lived branches and a product release cycle of about three releases a year. Silos existed between Dev, Ops, Test and Marketing,” said Anders Lundsgard, technical architect at Scania Connected Services. By 2013, he added, feature teams were adopting processed based on a strict adherence to Scrum.
Scania’s Dev and Ops teams were housed in different locations and working separate goals that were not aligned or cohesive. These teams suffered from confused communications and increasing stress as development worked only on new features while operations tried to use the new software in a stable way in production.
Pivotal Changes
Everything started coming together when Scania formed feature teams that progressively shouldered more of the responsibility for forwarding code to all environments and making it work. “There was no involvement in this from operations or infrastructure as they supported tooling and automation for on-premise infrastructure and shifted software to a cloud platform,” Lundsgard said.
Scania ultimately added Perforce Helix, a software configuration management tool. As long as software engineers know that the focal point of their work is checking in their code, the Perforce product can be the single point of storage of any one software component for all projects in the deployment pipelines. This way there are no multiple, correct current versions of any piece of code that could cause confusion. “Perforce has a number of capabilities that help engineers collocate software for reviews and even shelve files as they pass between developers,” says Lundsgard.
Scania uses Perforce Helix in combination with its continuous integration (CI) environment and processes to improve quality beyond what manual testing could ever accomplish. “The goal is that software engineers check code into Perforce Helix at least daily,” Lundsgard said.
Scania DevOps Processes Today
Scania now versions every change and automates builds, tests and deployments, with CI as a central development practice. The company no longer uses feature branches, with everyone adding code directly to the mainline. “We use a microservice-oriented architecture in order that each feature team can manage and own certain services,” Lundsgard said.
Different teams approach development with varying degrees of DevOps maturity. Some teams deploy software continuously, sometimes many times per day. Other teams benefit from using some manual testing and may not deploy software for a few weeks. “The tooling has enabled all teams to have a fully automated process for pushing their code into all environments if they choose—automatically or via a click of a button,” Lundsgard said.
Remaining Challenges
Scania next plans to fully automate every component of infrastructure from the network to the servers. “Some of our infrastructure and operations people have started to adopt infrastructure as code and they version that code in Perforce Helix as well,” Lundsgard said.
