The new era of ALM in Airbus with Tuleap Customer story: Airbus Group

These are the reasons why Airbus wanted an Application Lifecycle Management solution:

• Supervise the application lifecycle
• Be able to move to DevOps philosophy: “For us, Tuleap has been a very easy way to move to DevOps. We needed a kind of core, and we rely on Tuleap for that.”
• Ensure traceability: start at the initial planning, to finish at the retirement
• Improve collaboration and avoid duplicate effort: “When you have a team of developers in Bagalore (India) and one in Toulouse, if they do not exchange well together and do not share a repository, duplicates exist and usually this creates bugs.”
• Increase quality
• Reduce maintenance cost

If Airbus IT infrastructure did not find the appropriate solution, this would have led to more shadow IT.

We know that people do not want the current solutions.

And if people do not find tools they like to do their job, they DIYing their IT whether it is troubleshooting issues, setting up their own tools.

Open Source

For some years, Airbus has performed a huge change in its mindset: the increasing digitalization of the organization lead to even more Open Source values, technologies… and finally a full-on Open Source strategy:

→ Boost the use of Open Source software

• Leverage Enterprise Open Source advantages:
  • Lower TCO,
  • Quicker implementations,
  • Better quality and security, etc
• Reduce the dependency from classical software suppliers. “We want to be free. We avoid vendor-locking.”
• Increase innovation and interoperability

→ Embrace the Open way of working

Improve the motivation and efficiency of collaborators and make it more attractive through for 4 golden rules:

• Transparency
• Collaboration
• Sharing
• Empowerment

“For us this means: you are able to take the decision you have to take. You do not rely on your manager, who relies on another manager and so on. You have a mission, you are able to make the best decisions to reach your goals yourself.”

Designed as self-service mode

“We wanted teams to be able to get a ready-to-use workspace in less than 24 hours. They need a new project? They have it. We wanted something « easy to consume for our customers », a tool to be autonomous with. No long purchasing process. A tool with which the project leaders could administrate and configure their projects, create new workflows, add new fields. We did not want them to ask us every 5 minutes to change something. This is valuable for us because we are quite busy people.”

High flexibility

“We talk about Agile and DevOps but every one has its own approach. No two Scrum teams work the same way. Each project manager has its own method. It can be a bit frustrating if the tool enforces you to do Scrum “this way”. How will you be able to leverage your experience in using Scrum and think: “For this project, it will be better if I do “like this.”, and that you cannot implement it in the tool?”

Automated resolution of incidents at Airbus IT Infrastructure

In the IT Infrastructure, we are developers and Ops working in agile. We do not follow Scrum or any classical agile approaches. We have re-created our own agile and DevOps method to support our operations maintenance.
We use Tuleap to automate actions to manage the workflow for change notes i.e, any internal customers request. Even if our incident management workflow can be seen as complex, with Tuleap, it is very simple and end-user oriented.

Tuleap is not only about project management. In addition, we can track the quotation of any change and recharge the requesting services.

Streamlined development workflow at Flight Physics department

Flight Physics at Airbus is a department of 800 people studying the impacts of external physics on aircraft. It covers 5 disciplines: handing qualities, aerodynamics, performance, mass properties, loads and aeroelastics. A transversal service called Capabilities and Research is in charge of ensuring that the tools used are permanently available and running smoothly.

There are 250 applications to manage with very different constraints. Some are critical because directly embedded in the aircraft, others made computation in one second, others in 3 weeks.

In the Flight Physics department, people use Tuleap for:

• developing applications,
• portfolio management,
• following quality costs,
• tracking incidents.

• In the engineering field, Tuleap is integrated with Eclipse (another tool), to automatically send and monitor errors from the end-users applications to the server. The Flight Physics department needed a tool to build a bridge between the 800 users (the customers) and the developers, a way to unify the way the customers submitted issues on applications. Before, this was only made by emails or Excel sheets, far from the industrial way.
  

• On the development side, Tuleap is used along with Git, Jenkins, Eclipse IDE and Sonar.
  Using the Eclipse Mylyn connector for Tuleap, developers better understand customer requests, using contextual information of the incident, and track resolution status. This fine integration between tools makes developers’ job a lot more easier.