Power Tools: Empowering Modern Delivery with Toolchain

As VP of Platform and Data Solutions, I lead cloud product development, core services and tools, with a team that manages shared developer and data solutions for Modern Delivery product teams and customers.  

As CIO Frank Nazzaro noted in his article, The Agile Way to Innovation, Freddie Mac is reinventing the way it organizes, funds, builds and delivers software solutions to customers through a long-term shift in technology and culture called Modern Delivery.  

The actual set of technology and integrated tools we’re using to accomplish this transformation is called the Modern Delivery Toolchain, which is being used to automate the software delivery process, increasing quality and speed to market, while reducing risk.   

What is the Modern Delivery Toolchain?  

The Toolchain offers product teams a fast and frictionless development and deployment experience using secure automation, technologies such as Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket, as well as role-based access controls aligned to Modern Delivery, expert consultation and support. 

Each Modern Delivery product team receives access to the Toolchain with varying levels of access. Importantly, all Toolchain technologies and resources also provide metrics, offering customers continual and transparent visibility into how their product team is performing in comparison to Freddie Mac performance standards.   

Three key principles   

Of course, automated software development is nothing new. However, at Freddie Mac, our parameters are particularly rigorous—which made developing automation technologies via the Modern Delivery toolchain both challenging and instructive. Here are a few key mottos we stuck to while building the Toolchain that allowed us to focus on higher productivity while staying secure:   

• Shift left, but don’t fall left – In a highly regulated industry, developers should be empowered, but they cannot be given complete freedom. Speed is as much about proper guardrails and discipline as it is about proper tooling and automation. With the Toolchain, we worked hard to provide appropriate safeguards so that developers could increase productivity speed with a safety harness beneath them. 
• Balance control with flexibility – As we built the Toolchain, we found that many of the tools were too permissive out of the box. A lot of effort was spent wrapping these tools with code that provided the flexibility customers demanded while maintaining appropriate levels of control.  
• Provide frameworks and self-service to improve scale – Centralizing control increased security, but it also meant the Toolchain struggled to keep up with customer demand. So we devised a contributor model that allows customers to safely propose new pieces of functionality, which are reviewed based on standards and practices. This keeps the Toolchain flexible for improvement without comprising Freddie Mac’s security posture.  

As Modern Delivery continues to grow and expand—changing the way we work and deliver for the business and customers—so, too, will the Toolchain. Using the principles above, our product teams can continue to rely on modern, secure and ever-improving technologies and tools designed to empower them, resulting in better products delivered faster.