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Empowering IG Group’s product development teams to become transformation drivers
How Equal Experts built internal capabilities and skills
As a global leader in online trading and investments, offering innovative financial products across 18 countries, IG Group operates in a fast-moving landscape where agility, responsiveness and robust quality are essential. IG Group’s CTO Adam Wheelwright recognized that fragmented, inefficient ways of working were limiting his product development teams’ capabilities with big impacts on how quickly new applications could be deployed. He set the target of transforming product development at IG Group by driving behaviour change and improving the teams’ performance against DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics. This would include transforming the approach to development pipelines and testing, accelerating deployment times and laying the foundations for future agility through cloud adoption.
To succeed, it was crucial that this transformation program do more than just impose new ways of working. The goal was to build developers’ capabilities in a way that empowered them to act as their own agents of change going forward. IG Group asked Equal Experts to design and deploy a transformation plan that would equip IG developers with the confidence and skills to adopt best practice and the understanding to apply it to new areas.
Outcomes
0%
change failure rate reduced from 33% to zero
125%
increase in code coverage, from 40% to 90%
60 days
reduction in time required to deploy application changes
About IG Group
Headquartered in the UK and with over 40 software engineering teams based in Bangalore, Krakow and Chicago, IG Group is a global leader in online trading and investments. It operates in 18 countries across 5 continents where its spread betting and CFD trading products enable traders to bet on the direction of equities, bonds and currencies without owning the underlying assets.
Industry
Financial
Organisation size
3,000 employees across 18 countries
Location
London, Bangalore, Krakow, Chicago
Project length
Six months
Challenge
Uplevelling software development practices for future agility
Equal Experts consultants worked with the Head of Engineering Enablement and the CTO’s technical leadership team to pin down key areas where building capabilities through best practice could unlock more of the potential of developers’ skills, and accelerate the deployment pipeline. Michael Sanders, Technical Manager at IG, said:
“IG sought to introduce and embed CI/CD to established development teams that had never done it before. We foresaw big challenges with education & training, overcoming technical challenges, and changing existing ways of working. We decided the best way to ‘infect’ teams with best-practice CI/CD was to temporarily embed senior technical people who already had a deep understanding of CI/CD, and have those people partner with the team members directly. We focused the engagement on empowerment, training, and cultural change in the context of delivering an ‘exemplar’ application.”
They identified problems with an inverted test pyramid structure that placed too much reliance on end-to-end tests, and swallowed up time through requirements for manual quality checks. A lack of standardised continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines delayed delivery and prevented efficient scaling. Code and test coverage was lacking, the development teams were unable to move to a new observability stack and lacked mechanisms to enforce shorter build times or vulnerability checks. The teams’ lack of experience with cloud technologies also hampered plans for cloud adoption, and shut off potential paths to greater agility and cost-efficiencies.
IG Group asked Equal Experts to develop and execute a transformation plan that would drive rapid adoption of best practices, deliver step-change improvements in DORA metrics and delivery KPIs, and empower developer teams with the behaviours and capabilities they need to get more from their skills.
Solution
Learning and implementing through a paired approach and Knowledge Transfer sessions
Equal Experts designed a transformation plan in which it worked with exemplar teams in time-boxed periods of three months at a time. This enabled an Equal Experts team of 5 consultants and an Engagement Manager to surface on-the-ground insights about challenges and barriers, drive change quickly and work in active pairs with IG developers to help them absorb and implement best practices. The Equal Experts team spent one week out of every month co-located with IG developers in Bangalore to enable hands-on Knowledge Transfer sessions for explaining topics and accelerating the learning curve.
IG Group’s Statements team took on the role of the first exemplar team. The three-month timebox began with a two-week discovery process to understand the challenges the team faced. Equal Experts established a conventional test pyramid, introduced automated tests and ensured proper scenario coverage so that deployments could proceed more quickly and with greater confidence. Introducing an IG standard CI/CD pipeline delivered immediate benefits of one-click deployment and reusability. Equal Experts then helped the Statements team to integrate test coverage, code coverage and vulnerability checking into the pipeline, and move to a new observability stack that helped to set the right service level objectives (SLOs) for applications and deliver alerts via Teams and email.
This rapid progress made Equal Experts partners in the Statements team’s success, demonstrating the rapidly expanding capabilities of the engineers and their manager. It also established valuable momentum that was taken up by the Trading and Charges team, the second exemplar team that Equal Experts and IG Group selected. Equal Experts consultants were able to accelerate the discovery process for Trading and Charges by highlighting similar challenges and solutions. Identifying the benefits to be gained from containerisation helped to remove barriers to cloud adoption and establish a foundation for future agility and cost-efficiencies.
Results
Sustainable transformation through capability building
The transformation plan that Equal Experts designed and implemented delivered dramatic improvements against IG Group’s key measures of success for both teams:
- DORA metrics demonstrated the impact of DevOps best practices, with average lead time reduced from over 18 hours to under 4 hours and change failure rate reduced from 33% to zero.
- Code coverage increased from 40% to 90% with test execution times reduced from 45 minutes to three minutes.
- The time required to deploy application changes reduced from an average of 60 days to a matter of hours, transforming deployment frequency from once every two months to daily.
- Equal Experts and the Trading and Charges team successfully migrated the first IG application onto a new, Nomad private cloud infrastructure, with containerisation for improved agility and efficiency. This has paved a road for other applications to follow.
- The Nomad cloud migration dramatically reduced the requirement for transferring large files between servers and systems, accelerating the development pipeline
Throughout the engagement, Equal Experts established champions for the transformation program, who were equipped with the skills and motivation to continue driving improvements. Since working alongside Equal Experts consultants, the Trading and Charges team has started containerisation for two more applications, ready for migration to the cloud. The Statements Team has succeeded in onboarding the majority of its applications onto the new Observability platform.
Equal Experts exceeded my expectations. [They] exhibited a degree of ownership and constructive challenge that is very rare in my experience for an external consultancy.
Technical Manager
, IG Group