About SIX
SIX is the backbone of the Swiss financial industry and responsible for the Swiss financial infrastructure. SIX is an unlisted limited company based in Zurich. SIX shareholders are 150 national and international financial institutions and therefore the main users of the infrastructure including Credit Suisse, UBS, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase. SIX has CHF 5.7 billion ($US 6 billion) in assets, generated 328.9 million Swiss Francs ($US 338 million) in 2011, and employs approximately 3,900 people from 52 nations at 40 locations in 285 countries.

SIX provides a complete range of high-quality services in four business areas, covering all aspects of securities trading, post-trade services, financial information and cashless payments:

  • Swiss Exchange: one of Europe’s leading regulated exchanges and the reference market for more than 40,000 Swiss securities
  • Securities Services: offers Swiss and international financial centers a largely automated infrastructure for the clearing and settlement of securities transactions. Interbank securities custody and administration services as well as services geared at public limited companies are also included in the offering.
  • Financial Information: SIX is the third largest provider of financial information in Europe with the full range of reference data on over nine million financial instruments along with real-time market data with regard to all major trading centers.
  • Payment Services: offers services and solutions for cashless payment processes. This includes payment execution between banks in Swiss francs and euros, operation of Paynet for the settlement of electronic invoices, card processing for issuers and acceptance of credit, debit and prepaid cards.

 

Project Overview
Within the Payment Services business area, SIX Interbank Clearing has 60 employees and operates the interbank payment systems called SIC and euroSIC in Switzerland and across its borders. It thereby enables banks worldwide to handle their payments in either Swiss francs or euros rapidly and securely. Interconnected with the primary players in the Swiss financial center, it also provides other economically vital payment traffic services.

The original SIC system was introduced in 1987 and recognized worldwide as a milestone in the processing of interbank payments. However, after 25 years, it was determined that the architecture, based on a mainframe with Cobol and Assembler, was reaching its limits in its ability to meet increasing demands from financial institutions. The new architecture, SIC4, is the answer to the challenges of the coming decades and is being created over a period of four years. SIC4 is being built on a mid-range Linux system using Java.
To handle the project, SIX selected a range of powerful, affordable, and user-friendly tools from Atlassian as well as some leading open source tools. In addition, for requirements management, the team first settled on an in-house solution.

Project Challenges
SIX determined a number of challenges as the project matured in the first months:

  • The simple, custom-built solution for requirements management was not user-friendly, and there were no easy collaboration capabilities for the team and managers
  • Too many manual steps in conveying information between teams regarding content in their respective tools. For example manual intervention was required to communicate Tasks to the engineering team for associated Requirements from program managers
  • No way to integrate Requirements with Test Case management and automate test execution in the future
  • No way to quickly and easily find information across the project. Individual repositories had to be searched in a time-consuming way.
  • Difficult to achieve reporting and dashboards on the end-to-end progress of the project

Solution
zAgile’s Wikidsmart was the only platform SIX could find in the market which fit their needs in terms of Requirements Management integrated within Confluence and JIRA as well as integration of the whole software engineering environment for powerful interoperability, search, traceability, and reporting. Today, Requirements are managed by a dedicated Requirements Engineering team using Wikidsmart within Confluence. In addition, zAgile supported SIX to not only configure the environment, but also to import existing Requirements from the in-house system into the combined Wikidsmart/Confluence/JIRA environment for a painless migration.

Benefits
Now project team members can capture requirements in a collaborative and structured way within Confluence and have those requirements instantly tied to Projects, Issues, and Tasks within JIRA projects. Managers can track the progress of Tasks and Issues with respect to Requirements with powerful reporting and dashboard capabilities within Confluence thanks to Wikidsmart. Team members and managers can quickly and instantly find the precise project information they require. All of these benefits save time in project management and team collaboration, drive high-quality for the SIC4 project, and ultimately ensure the success of the project to be on-time and within budget.


Customer:  SIX

Business Challenges

  • Achieve user-friendly, easy collaboration capabilities for the team and managers
  • Automate steps in conveying information between teams regarding content in their respective tools
  • Integrate Requirements with Test Case management and automate test execution
  • Quickly and easily find information across the project
  • Achieve reporting and dashboards on the end-to-end progress of the project

Environment
Atlassian Tools

  • JIRA: issue and task management and tracking
  • Confluence wiki for sharing feature requirement documents and collaboration
  • Crucible: peer code review
  • FishEye: browse, search, and track code in the version control repository

Leading Open Source Tools

  • Jenkins: continuous integration
  • Sonar: quality management platform
  • Subversion: version control

 
Solution

  • Requirements are managed by a dedicated Requirements Engineering team using Wikidsmart within Confluence, integrated with JIRA.
  • Wikdismart integrates the whole software engineering environment for powerful interoperability, search, traceability, and reporting.

Benefits

  • Collaborative Requirements Management within Confluence, integrated with JIRA
  • Interoperability of all software engineering tools
  • Traceability and faceted search of all software engineering artifacts: Requirements, Issues, Tasks, Code, etc.

 

“A tight deadline of one month was required to resolve all of these issues and keep the requirements engineering in the project on time. We have been quite pleased with the zAgile team and its products and services. With their support, we are confident that SIC4 is staying on track for success.”
- Marco Kundert,
Requirements and Project Management
SIX

About zAgile
Founded in 2006, zAgile's mission is to integrate teams, tools and applications, processes, and knowledge. zAgile is the creator of Wikidsmart, a powerful platform for fast, smart integration of software engineering tools, CRM, Help Desk, and more. With Wikidsmart, now cross-functional teams and cross-functional processes benefit from systems that work together effortlessly.

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