How Wells Fargo Took 401K App Development from 70% Maintenance to 70% Innovation

Software tools help the Wells Fargo's retirement division conserve developers’ time and identify code that can be reused.

Bank Technology News | June, 2011

In the institutional retirement and trust division of Wells Fargo, which provides 401k recordkeeping for 3.6 million participants in employer-sponsored retirement plans, chief architect Gene Baker has several goals for his development team, one of which is to shift technology spend from maintenance to new functionality. “The business doesn't get any value from our doing maintenance, there's nothing new they can go out and sell, there's no competitive advantage,” he notes. While four years ago about 70% of the group’s work was devoted to maintenance and 30% to building new functionality, today that ratio is reversed. “We're trying to push those numbers even higher,” Baker says. The next thing he’s tracking is quality and efficiency. “The better quality we can build into our product, the less maintenance we have to do,” he says. “And of course, the more efficiency we can build into our software, the more features and functionality can be built in.” Finally, Baker looks at performance of the programs, from two perspectives: capacity defined by space [storage space used by the underlying data] and processing time. “The less time a job takes to run, the more records we can process,” he notes.

The developers at WyStar work on about 300 development projects a year. “These are not small projects,” he notes. “We’ll get new features for customers that we’re bringing on board, we'll get feature and functionality requests from Wells Fargo business people. Then Congress, the IRS and other the legislative bodies change the rules every year, and to keep in compliance we have to change the system for that.”

One thing that was eating up developers’ time was extraneous requests from documentation people, project managers, testers, business analysts, and the like. Application testers would come to them with change requirements, and ask the developers to tell them what they needed to test. “It might take two hours for the developer to do an analysis of the code and come back to the tester with seven things they have to test,” Baker relates. “And that report was by no means comprehensive, it was a manual search.” Product managers might ask the developers to tell them all the pieces of code that would have to change to expand an employee number field from 10 to 12 characters. At the same time, the developers time is extremely valuable, he notes.

Using software analysis tools from Cast Software, Wells Fargo was able to shift such tasks from off the developers’ shoulders and back to the testers and project managers. “Cast parses through all our code and creates an application knowledge warehouse of everying in the code,” Baker says. “It unlocks the secrets that are in the code or in the developer’s head.” A tester can ask the Cast software to look for certain things and it will make a comprehensive list, so that the tester and developer know exactly what to test. “Now the developer can make sure they actually did test everything,” Baker says. “By doing so, not only did we take all that onus off the development staff, we put the labor back where it belongs. We also help the developers improve the quality of what they were turning over.” Using this method, application quality has risen and defects have dropped.