DriveNets enables data-driven software development to optimize SDLC

With the Jira integration from Rivery, DriveNets gains better visibility into its software development data, reduces the time spent on repeated report creation, and improves capacity planning.

Key Takeaways

• With Rivery, DriveNets has gained visibility to all of it’s software development status data from the epic level down to specific tasks. 
• It is now easier to gain visibility into the capacity of groups and teams for the upcoming PI, and identify gaps and bottlenecks more effectively.
• Visualizing extracted data from Jira has helped the DriveNets engineering team to align around the plan and ensure the entire team is moving in the same direction.
• The ability to quickly see the data in place improved Jira data entry and optimized resource-planning, status tracking, and retrospective processes.

DriveNets, is a rapidly growing software company that has created a radical new way for service providers and hyperscalers to build their networking infrastructure. DriveNets Network Cloud and DriveNets Network Cloud-AI are new innovative networking solutions that apply the cloud architectural approach to high-scale networking. 

DriveNets raised $587 million over three funding rounds and its solutions are used by tens of service providers globally. This includes providers such as AT&T and Comcast. DriveNets is engaged with tens of operators and cloud-providers on large projects in North America, Asia, and Europe.

Managing the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) in Jira

As a software company delivering critical software to be deployed amongst the largest organizations in the world, mastering the development process of the software is a critical component of the organization’s success. DriveNets SDLC management process is broken into 3 phases: 

• Planning
• Tracking
• Retrospective

Each phase has clearly defined activities and metrics that determine the organization’s ability to deliver and ship new code faster, with more features, and to keep  improving towards the next release cycle. 

To manage the development activities, DriveNets is using Jira and a set of different team leads that manage the processes. With Jira being a great tool to log the different activities, gaining a quick overview of the actual development status proved to be a challenging process. 

In Jira’s dashboards, there is no easy way to see the status of your activities and drill-down to the detailed tasks: from the parent all the way to the grandchild. It’s also very hard to model in your business logic. We ended up wasting a lot of time, creating a lot of dashboard copies and missing many data quality issues.

Sharon Oren, VP Program & Release Management

Building the Modern Data Platform

In search of an effective solution for data reports, Barak Vanunu, Information Systems Tech Lead at DriveNets, decided to build a modern data platform. After researching his options, Barak decided on a data architecture involving Rivery to extract, load and transform data within a Snowflake data warehouse. The architecture was complete with Power BI to serve as the visual analytics tool that was already used at DriveNets by other teams.   

I looked for tools that were easy-to-use and innovative. I researched quite a bit, consulted with colleagues and data consultants and they all gave positive feedback about combining Rivery and Snowflake. – said Barak.

DriveNets decided to partner with BIyond, a trusted analytics consultancy and Rivery certified partner to set up the architecture foundation and kick off the project with best practices in place from day one. With Rivery being used to easily extract data from Jira and Monday.com, data started flowing quickly into Snowflake. The team then shifted the focus to data modeling, orchestrating ingestion processes and SQL transformations with Rivery’s Logic Rivers.  

Even though I’m not a data engineer by training, I was able to quickly understand what Rivery does and how it would help our use case. It was an easy acquisition with peace of mind. – said Barak.

Using Data to Achieve Operational Excellence

With the data easily accessible via a single Power BI dashboard, the DriveNets team tuned their operations and optimized several processes. The first win for the engineering team was about creating alignment. With data easily visible to top executives and every software engineer, the entire team is focused on delivering against the same goals. The visibility helped to improve Jira data completeness and accuracy has improved dramatically as now it’s easy to see and find missing data and bottlenecks. 

While preparing the first report, we identified variations in how scrum teams use Jira and noted the absence of critical information, such as team capacity. This led to improved Jira usage, enhancing visibility and efficiency. – said Sharon.

The team is now able to optimize capacity planning at the team and group level, detect potential blockers earlier and ensure higher rates of actual delivery vs. planned delivery. Beyond the optimization, the team is able to draw better conclusions and identify what development efforts could be made generic and benefit all customers vs. a specific use case. 

It took us a bit of time to realize we are getting insights and not just details. We are now building upon the success and tuning the process even further to access more insights and keep on optimizing our software release process. – said Sharon.