HIGHLIGHTSHIGHLIGHTS
- Moved from 2 releases a year to a monthly release cycle
- Moved from nightly to multiple daily builds
- ~60% reduction CI/CD build time
- ~70% reduction local build time
DATEV: A Global Financial Powerhouse
Since 1966, DATEV eG has been supporting auditors, tax consultants, lawyers, and enterprises with software, services, consulting and education. Headquartered in Germany with over 8200 employees worldwide, DATEV members and their SME and SMP clients rely on the company’s range of services, software solutions, consulting, and education services to power their businesses and facilitate growth.
THE CHALLENGE: Faster Builds, Shorter Release Cycles
The DATEV centralized CI team provides support to over 800 developers with MS build tools, runs the CI/CD pipeline and operates as a help desk, too. The team supports other teams responsible for over 200 products, which are particular tightly coupled. They needed to run one massive build on their 650 agent build farm to ensure that all components fit perfectly together. The build farm serves several thousands of builds daily, from smaller gated builds to large multi-hour nightly builds. To achieve greater customer satisfaction and faster innovation – DATEV was looking to transform to a centralized build model that would facilitate a monthly product release, instead of the biannual build model that have been managed by the dev teams itself used previously.
THE SOLUTION: Incredibuild
DATEV chose Incredibuild to enable their move to provide dev teams with centralized compilation computing services. This enabled them to build with much greater frequency and accuracy. They moved their large CI build from one nightly build to two or three daily builds. This greatly supports their switch from 2 releases per year to a monthly release. Moreover, Incredibuild enabled their dev teams to discover “who broke the build” earlier in the dev cycle, resulting in faster issue resolution and overall higher-quality output.
THE BENEFITS: Centralized Compilation, Streamlined Dev Cycles
DATEV successfully transitions to a centralized build methodology. This had a dramatic impact to the resources required for their large-scale builds. Incredibuild is a great tool in saving additional build resources, enabling shorter development and release cycles. Moreover, DATEV was able to achieve up to 60% reduction in CI/CD build time – from 8-9 hours for the overall CI build to just 4-5 hours. Moreover, DATEV enjoyed a 60-70% reduction in local build times – which used to take over an hour and were shortened to just minutes.
“To stay competitive, DATEV had to make a radical adjustment – moving to a monthly shipping model instead of 2 times a year. Incredibuild was a great tool in helping to achieve this objective.”
Christian Häfner
Senior Software/DevOps Engineer
