How Cognizant uses GitHub
Cognizant helps companies use technology to transform their businesses and adapt to rapidly changing markets. The company's own IT team embraces this mentality while serving one of the world's largest enterprises, supporting hundreds of applications and thousands of application components across multiple SDLC environments for more than 300,000 employees.
Location: Teaneck, NJ
Industry: IT Consulting
Number of Seats: 1,000+
Modernizing Engineering Processes
The majority of Cognizant's applications are built using a mobile-first, cloud-first strategy on modern platforms such as Microsoft Azure. However, the company's engineering processes were built in the pre-cloud era. Cognizant set out to transform their core processes and tools to align with their digital strategy using Azure DevOps and GitHub.
Cognizant evaluated GitHub for its solid disaster recovery support and capability to structure projects for agile development, DevOps, and modern ways of working. An initial pilot with an ERP system showed that GitHub significantly improved collaboration among teams. "GitHub enables seamless workflows through a branching strategy that in turn leads to better team productivity," says Senior Director of IT Prakash Pazamalai.
Key Benefits
Remote and Offline Development
GitHub's support for offline development proved especially valuable during remote working scenarios. "It was possible for employees to work remotely before, over a VPN connection, but GitHub really makes it much easier," says Pazamalai.
Integration and Traceability
The ability to easily integrate GitHub with third-party platforms and support end-to-end traceability before and after deployment was a key feature. Cognizant adopted Microsoft Azure Boards through Azure DevOps for project management, using webhooks and service connections to retrieve code from GitHub and associate code check-ins with specific User Stories. "GitHub gels really well with Azure DevOps," says DevOps Program Manager Karpagasundaram Balakrishnan. "The integration provides great traceability and visibility into code changes."
Scalable Implementation
Encouraged by the pilot's success, Cognizant began a phased migration of applications prioritized by criticality and developer community size. GitHub needed to be set up for around 200 applications over two to three months, with each application requiring six to seven repositories and proper permissions. Rather than configure this manually, the team automated the process of creating and configuring GitHub infrastructure, including repo creation, access provisioning, and branching rules enablement.
Results
Today, part of Cognizant IT's line of business applications are developed using GitHub, ranging from tools for requesting internal resources to customization code for cloud platforms like Salesforce. The new workflows and improved code review process have enhanced code quality and significantly improved the lives of hundreds of developers at Cognizant, enabling cleaner workflows and clearer history.
The shift to GitHub has boosted team morale. "We're getting great feedback from our teams in terms of how it feels to work in this environment," Balakrishnan says.
Cognizant's Git branching strategy supports parallel development and an Agile-based delivery model. When multiple people collaborate on a project, GitHub keeps track of all changes pushed to a repository, allowing different versions of a codebase to be managed and deployed according to business priority.
"GitHub is not just our code repository," Pazamalai says. "It is much more than that. It allowed our developers to connect and contribute together on a project and develop it without meeting personally. That was another big win coming off a pandemic year."
"The benefits have been innumerable," says AVP Hariprasad Vijayaraghavan. "Migrating to GitHub aligns beautifully with our cloud-first strategy and moves us further ahead in our journey to modernize processes and support cloud development, mobile development, microservices."