Blue Soft has been working with Médiamétrie for over 10 years to meet their production engineering and system and network needs. Since 2009, Médiamétrie has adopted the Agile SCRUM method for software development. In 2015, Médiamétrie decided to extend Agility to the Production teams by adopting a DevOps cultureculture, making it one of the pioneers in France.

This decision has contributed to strengthen the collaboration between Médiamétrie and Blue Soft, which makes Devops one of its specialties.

We spoke with Christophe Roulland, director of the Devops department at Médiamétrie since 2020. He explained the origins of this department, how it works and why Blue Soft has been their preferred partner for a long time.

You have been the director of the Devops department since 2020. How is it structured?

"Our Devops department is made up of 8 teams, and each team handles a portfolio of products. Each of these teams consists of:

  • 3 to 5 developers
  • 1 or 2 Ops
  • Cross-functional Scrum Masters in several teams
  • 1 Product Owner "

Why did Médiamétrie create a Devops department?

"One of the first reasons is cultural. Wehad a hard time uniting Devs and Ops around a common goal. Before we had a Devops department, the Devs' goal was to create projects and make changes, while the Ops' goal was to stabilize the system, which meant avoiding change. The objectives of the two departments were therefore quite opposite. Now, you have to know that Médiamétrie is truly data centric; we manage over 1 billion pieces of data every day.

The creation of a Devops department gave the teams a common objective: to bring about change while guaranteeing a high level of application stability and reliability. In addition to the project activities carried out during Scrum sprints, the DevOps team can now be called upon to resolve production incidents.

Moreover, today, Ops are now also developers. To do infrastructure, you have to do development (virtualization, cloud): this is calledInfrastructure as Code.

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The ability of Ops to develop has greatly facilitated the creation of a Devops department. This allowed us to work fairly quickly on the Devops issues that are legion today. Since 2016-2017, all our new products and all our redesigns are done via cloud (AWS). Back then, we were already implementing automated deployment pipelines, for example. We were among the first to use tools like Terraform, Ansible, etc.

With the impetus of cloud, the merging of the teams came about quite naturally, even though, in parallel, we were also projecting Ops into the different teams to facilitate the "merger".

What about agility? How does it work for you?

"All of our software development teams have adopted the Agile SCRUM method since 2009."

How does Blue Soft fit into your Devops strategy?

"We have a long history of working with Blue Soft. We often called on them for their great production engineering and system and network skills.

As soon as we started using Devops tools, Blue Soft was able to offer us the right profiles."

What has made the Médiamétrie - Blue Soft collaboration a success for so many years?

" The strength of Blue Soft is that we have been working in close proximity for a very long time. They have seen us evolve and know our needs very well. When we contact them to look for a profile, they know how to refer us efficiently and quickly.

They also know how to come to us with profiles that meet our needs at the time. And that's due, again, to the fact that we've been working together for a long time and they know our evolution.

To summarize: They are responsive, they know how to be proactive when it comes to proposing profiles that would be of interest to us, and they have always been able to adapt to our evolution."

You are wondering about the Devops strategy to implement in your organization? We can help you organize and structure your teams, contact our experts!

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