2005 C.I.P.A. Winners

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Cognos Inc.

Configuration Management Automation

Cognos Incorporated, a global leader in enterprise business intelligence and performance planning software, specializes in corporate performance-management solutions that enable organizations to better monitor, understand and improve key steps in the management cycle. Cognos customers are involved in every industry sector.

Founded in 1969, Ottawa-based Cognos employs more than 3,400 people and serves customers in 135 countries. Revenue in fiscal 2005 was $825 million US.

Challenge

Software development includes a critical step referred to as the software "build" -pulling together all the pieces of software being written by different developers and integrating them into a single, installable suite of programs that can be handed off to quality-control specialists for testing. This process is repeated numerous times until the software is deemed ready for release.

At Cognos, a group of about 50 employees called Build Engineering is responsible for delivering all software builds for the company, supporting hundreds of Cognos developers working principally in Ottawa, but with significant contributions from development teams in five locations in the UK, US and Sweden.

Historically, the software build was a manual process, with builders using a keystroke-by-keystroke approach to collect all the pieces of software from a variety of computers. This repetitive process often involved as many as four or five builders for each product. As the number of its software components and products grew dramatically - to 800 today from 80 in 2001 - Cognos was challenged to keep up with an increasingly complex development environment and a rapidly growing build volume.

"The scalability of our build process was put under considerable pressure during the recent economic downturn," says Mark Dawe, Build Engineering manager. "Throughout that period, we needed a way to continue to create more products, while maintaining staff levels."

At the same time, the company adopted a policy of performing "a build every day" for each product under development, an industry best-practices approach meant to check regularly and often that the software could in fact be built and would run properly.

"With such a manual process for doing the builds and for controlling and tracking all the software pieces in all those different machines and at different levels, we knew we needed to find ways to improve productivity and reduce the risk of errors," adds Dawe.

Objectives

Dawe's group realized that they needed to automate the build process to improve its efficiency and scalability, as well as the resulting quality.

They also identified a need to provide real-time, step-by-step reporting to all R&D personnel, showing the build progress status on all platforms and languages.

Solution

Build Engineering's new build process was initially just a set of scripts that automated the keystroke sequences used to collect all the software pieces required to perform a build. But it has evolved since 2001 to become a sophisticated and highly automated software build and configuration management environment, enabling the team to perform15,000 builds a month, instead of the previous 1,400 - all with the same number of people.

The new environment is based on a technology platform consisting of a source-code control system, a database repository for build progress and status information, a Web-based front-end query and reporting interface, and a set of automated tools.

"The technology greatly enhances the build team's productivity by enabling them to automatically track all the software components and version/revision levels of those components, ensuring that they can pull all the right pieces together at the right moment - from anywhere in the world - to do the build," Dawe explains.

Innovative Use of Technology

One innovation by Cognos Build Engineering is what they refer to as "Build Datametrics," a real-time graphical Web interface to a comprehensive information repository that permits any developer, any time, anywhere in the world, to watch the progress of a build involving relevant components or products.

Now, developers can go to a single place to see all the information related to the build process - its progress, where the source code is being collected from, how long it took, what other software components it "consumed" and by what other higher-level components it was in turn consumed, and more. The Datametrics Web site also provides the capability for developers to initiate their own builds, without having to call the build group at all hours of the day and night to do this.

Build Engineering can analyze the data to help identify problems and improve its own effectiveness, Dawe says.

"It's a big part of the new foundation that's enabling Cognos to achieve a distributed, global, collaborative development environment."

A 2005 CIPA Winner!

For its exceptional application of information technology to solve real-world business problems, Cognos Inc. has been awarded a 2005 CIPA Silver Award of Excellence in the Organizational Transformation, For Profit category.

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