Dell Technologies + Collaborator

Complexity of Scale

Dell Infrastructure Solutions Group doesn’t do anything on a small scale. With over 10,000 employees spanning 50 product development groups, Adam Arakelian, Director of Engineering at Dell ISG, explains the complexity and scale the division faces. “We’ve got multiple products in different spaces. We’ve got software that’s in the cloud and on-prem, as well as embedded within hardware. We’ve got a myriad of different kinds of products.”

The sheer number of both employees and product groups under his care meant that Arakelian
was faced with several issues – not the least of which was that the many plates he was spinning were, “all on a different delivery schedule, all deliberately working in different ways.”

Identifying Barriers

It was clear that Dell ISG had to reduce friction across the board. To do that, Arakelian and his DevOps group began to identify the key issues affecting the organization’s productivity. One of the first issues they identified was what Arakelian calls the “Mobility Barrier,” which prevented the easy sharing of resources across his division.

“With different product groups, all working independently, it’s very challenging to take a number of engineers from group A and move them into product group B without them having to learn about new tools. Even if it’s the same tool, it’s used differently.” The crux of the problem, he says, is the time it takes for an engineer to acclimate when moving between product groups.

The second issue Arakelian identified was efficiency. It was, as he puts it, “ensuring that developers were focused on the delivery of business value rather than devoting time towards managing tools and their own processes.” Simply put, the devs needed to minimize the time spent that was not code focused.

Finally, Arakelian points to a duplication of efforts that affected the entire organization. “This whole notion of ‘build once and reuse many’ was something that we began to adopt at Dell ISG to reduce wasted time and energy, and reduce maintenance costs.” To illustrate, he said, “We have probably 25 different security mechanisms across our different products. We wanted to reduce those 25 security mechanisms to one that everybody used.” This notion of eliminating redundancy would extend beyond the software they were developing to improving the development process itself.

A Cultural Revolution

“We created common verticals across every single product group, and told them regardless of what process you use, we believe that across every software development lifecycle you
need to do at the minimum, these things.”

To answer the question, “How do we streamline a development process across these different organizations?” Arakelian and his team began by looking inward and examining the development culture at Dell. As he explains, they examined their development philosophy, and “took bits and pieces of the software development lifecycles that exist today and pulled them together to build something that worked for us. A consistent set of tools and processes.”

Arakelian used a network of influencers within the departments to champion their objectives without reinventing their existing process, and to avoid arbitrary, top-down, change. In this way, He and his team established a common language and terminology between all the departments under his care. It was crucial that everyone be on the same page. The goal was, “to be able to share code across different product groups, communicate across different product groups, and then ultimately be mobile across these different product groups due to a frictionless environment.”

The next key issue was to provide a unified platform and tool set that allowed all of that frictionless collaboration to happen. To do this, Arakelian and his team identified the “nominal core pieces that we believe you need to have in every software development lifecycle.” The group then collectively selected the tools necessary, like Jira for requirement and defects management and Artifactory for managing artifacts.

An Agent for Change

Collaborator, the SmartBear peer code and document review tool formed what Arakelian calls “the interconnecting tissue between these other, different, tool sets to facilitate CI/CD/CT.”

“Development groups are always integrating code. We’re constantly committing code, checking code in, integrating it forward from a branching perspective and having it reviewed on a continuous basis,” he points out, explaining the critical role Collaborator now plays across the ISG software development lifecycle. “Everybody needs to do a code review through Collaborator in order to move their code forward. That’s a core development practice.”

Ticking All the Boxes

“One of the major requirements and use cases that we had was that we are reviewing more than just code. We’re reviewing documentation, architectural diagrams, all the information that is pertinent to anything we’re building.” With Collaborator that was possible, and, just as importantly, the review process was the same across all product groups.

When it came to code review, Arkaelian had more specific requirements, as they needed to be able to send for review based solely on diffs. “Say you’re using GitHub, and you want to go through your pull request process,” he said. “That’s fine. However, at the same time, what if I just want a code review? I’ve written some code and I want a peer review. We needed a tool to be able to facilitate that use case.” Collaborator allowed them to do just that.

Improving Analytics

Regarding their other requirements, Arakelian says, “We needed to be able to leverage data and analytics, not just from the tooling perspective – but for our overall data persistence layer. And we needed that done in an easy and simple way. Again, Collaborator fit the bill for us there.”

With improved analytics, ISG could audit reviews and identify bottlenecks, thereby standardizing
and streamlining their CI/CD pipeline. “It gave us a double-click to manage a program so that we could better understand where our code actually is.” The benefits were huge, a clear picture of the status of all projects across all product groups in ISG in addition to knowing exactly how long each code review takes.

Seeing the Benefits

"We were able to standardize on Collaborator across 50 different products. It wasn’t just one or two products. It was 50 different products."

As Arakelian tells it, Collaborator and SmartBear played a critical role in improving the overall efficiency of production at Dell ISG.

• Increased code review productivity – Allowed Dell ISG to drive more across the product groups by easily building more small-batch commits and doing incremental small-batch code reviews.
• Quantified the time required for code review – Measurability within the entire CI/CD pipeline identified common thresholds and streamlined the process by exposing bottlenecks.
• Allowed for full CI/CD audits – Audits provided a detailed overview of the entire organization’s code-review process. The result was measurable, realistic, and pragmatic timelines.
• Removed duplication of effort – Ultimately created a single, organization-wide mechanism for code review that provided continuity, increased efficiency, and mobility across all departments.

Final Impressions

When asked why Dell Technologies chose SmartBear and Collaborator, Arakelian stresses the importance of working with a software partner rather than just purchasing a vendor solution.

“Organizations like SmartBear clearly understand the industry direction, and where people are headed. They’re willing to work with groups like Dell ISG, not only helping us achieve our goals, but also helping drive the industry forward.”

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