Itaú BBA achieves massive time savings with IBM Rational software

Itaú BBA is the wholesale, investment and institutional treasury banking division of the Itaú Unibanco group, one of the largest financial conglomerates in the world. Headquartered in Brazil, the division serves institutional investors and companies with sales in excess of BRL150 million. The Itaú BBA IT department has approximately 320 employees and an annual budget of USD200 million.

Selecting best-of-breed applications
Since 2002, Itaú BBA has relied on IBM^® Rational^® ClearCase^®, IBM Rational ClearQuest^® and IBM Rational Build Forge^® software to support its development efforts. In 2010, the company decided to supplement those applications with additional tools to create a more comprehensive application lifecycle management (ALM) solution to help:

• Increase developer productivity and help development teams more quickly deliver software
• Improve development governance through greater traceability, integration and transparency
• Reduce development documentation through automation and optimization of development workflows

Using Gartner’s Magic Quadrant research as a guide, Itaú BBA selected several best-of-breed ALM tools. The company then further narrowed down the list based on how well the tools could support its primary platform, Microsoft .Net, and based on its previous experience with the tools. Itaú BBA ultimately decided to perform proof-of-concepts with Microsoft Team Foundation Server and the IBM Jazz™ platform.

Creating a more comprehensive ALM solution
After identifying six primary ALM disciplines and defining 226 requirements, Itaú BBA selected IBM Rational Team Concert™ and IBM Rational Quality Manager software, which run on the IBM Jazz platform and integrate with the bank’s existing Rational Build Forge software. Rational Team Concert software provides a collaborative software configuration management platform that enables the bank to automate work items, builds and planning. The Rational Quality Manager software supports quality plans, test scripts, processes and test resources. Rational Build Forge software supports the build and deployment lifecycle, providing automation for build plans, scripts and deployment.
In the past, the bank’s ALM processes were workflow-based, required a unique development cycle for different sizes and types of projects, and involved a high level of dependency. Using the new ALM platform based on Rational software, the bank’s ALM processes are work item-based, support customized development cycles based on the type of project, and enable parallel work. Similarly, the bank’s old build process was workflow-based, and mixed management and operational tasks in the same workflow. The new build process is based on work items, separates operational and management tasks, and enables work to be performed in parallel.

According to Edson Portilho, ALM specialist, Itaú BBA, “One of the greatest benefits that we identified with the IBM ALM Solution is that it allows developers to focus on tasks related to code production, without dispersing their attention with unnecessary bureaucracy.”

Achieving massive time savings per year
In the past, it was difficult for Itaú BBA to extract metrics about its processes. Now, using Rational Team Concert software, the bank can easily track project progress, resulting in a 75 percent reduction in the time spent following-up on project statuses. The bank has also reduced the amount of time spent rewriting documentation by 50 percent and reduced the amount of time spent creating and updating workflows by 27 percent. Further, the bank has reduced the number of problems or delays in development by 10 percent and reduced the amount of time spent per year on development by 8 percent.

Within its build and deployment processes, the bank has also achieved significant benefits including:

• Reducing the amount of time required for deployment model preparation by 50 percent
• Decreasing the amount of time to install development versions by 50 percent
• Reducing the amount of effort required to adjust builds by 50 percent
• Reducing the amount of time spent creating and modifying workflows by 15 percent
• Reducing build time by 30 percent through support for parallel work
• Reducing operational errors, such as deploying incorrect artifacts, by 50 percent
• Reducing the amount of effort required to create a build by 95 percent
• Reducing the amount of time required to determine the version of artifacts in production by 50 percent

All told, the bank reduced the amount of time spent per year on build and deployment by 55 percent.

“Itaú BBA is dedicated to building a trusted and customized relationship with our customers so we can continue to address the complexity of their businesses,” says Luiz Carlos Cesário, architecture superintendent, Itaú BBA. “This attention to customers’ needs requires a constant focus on improving our IT environment to become more efficient and responsive to change.”

Application lifecycle management solutions from IBM
Effective application lifecycle management (ALM) integrates virtually all of the activities in the software development life cycle, automating time-consuming and repeatable tasks and providing tools that promote real-time collaboration between globally dispersed teams, partners and suppliers. The IBM Rational solution for collaborative lifecycle management (CLM) was designed to make it easier for traditional, agile and hybrid teams to implement an effective ALM environment across multiple platforms that meets the vast majority of their needs. This solution is built on an open and unifying Jazz platform and is comprised of a set of integrated products that work as one, including IBM Rational Requirements Composer, Rational Quality Manager, Rational Team Concert and IBM Rational Software Architect.

For more information
To learn more about IBM Rational software, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit:ibm.com/rational