The more code you put out there, the more of your technology spend you have to use each month to service the code that’s in production, maintain it and keep it current. So even if we didn’t have any defects and the only thing we had to do was keep up with IRS legislation, the more code we have out there, the more money it costs us to keep it current and compliant with the legislation.” The Cast tool also helps Baker identify opportunities for code reuse. By creating certain chunks of code and reusing them elsewhere, the developers can make a change or a fix once and have it be distributed throughout the retirement programs. “We’re looking at what features and functionalities we can convert and redeploy it as a service by putting it out on our service bus and making it consummable by all the different programs that need it, therefore further reducing our technical debt,”

1. 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.
By Penny Crosman
In the retirement services division
of Wells Fargo, called WyStar – the
group provides 401k recordkeep-
ing for six million participants of
corporate plan sponsors -- 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 bet-
ter 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 perspec-
tives: capacity defined by space
[storage space used by the underly-
ing 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 func-
tionality 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 extrane-
ous requests from documentation
people, project managers, testers,
business analysts, and the like.
Application testers would come to
them with change requirements,
“The better quality we
can build into our prod-
uct, the less mainte-
nance we have to do” “Using this method,
application quality has
risen and defects have
dropped”
June 3, 2011
BANK TECHNOLOGY NEWS

2. 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 charac-
ters. At the same time, the develop-
ers 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 manag-
ers. “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 do-
ing 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 im-
prove the quality of what they were
turning over.” Using this method,
application quality has risen and
defects have dropped.
Baker has also begun using the soft-
ware to comb through his group’s
three million lines of code to look
at all the different languages and
application building tools being
used, such as C++, COBOL , Visual
Basic and PowerBuilder; Baker es-
timates there are 45 to 50 different
technologies being used. “You have
to have at least two people on staff
that know every one of those tech-
nologies,” Baker says. “We made a
hit list of the technologies we’re go-
ing to obsolete and take out of our
mix” to reduce technical debt. “The
more code you put out there, the
more of your technology spend you
have to use each month to service
the code that’s in production, main-
tain it and keep it current. So even
if we didn’t have any defects and the
only thing we had to do was keep
up with IRS legislation, the more
code we have out there, the more
money it costs us to keep it current
and compliant with the legislation.”
The Cast tool also helps Baker iden-
tify opportunities for code reuse.
By creating certain chunks of code
and reusing them elsewhere, the
developers can make a change or a
fix once and have it be distributed
throughout the retirement pro-
grams.
“We’re looking at what features and
functionalities we can convert and
redeploy it as a service by putting it
out on our service bus and making
it consummable by all the different
programs that need it, therefore
further reducing our technical
debt,” Baker says.
“We are looking at […]
making it consum-
able by all the different
programs that need it,
therefore further reduc-
ing our technical debt”