Intuit has streamlined its software development lifecycle by migrating to Maven and Nexus Professional.
Intuit, Inc. provides business and financial management solutions for small and medium sized businesses, financial institutions, consumers, and accounting professionals in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
The company offers QuickBooks financial and business management software and services, technical support, financial supplies, and Web site design and hosting services for small businesses; and small business payroll products and services, as well as merchant services comprising credit and debit card processing, electronic check conversion, and automated clearing house services.
It also provides TurboTax income tax preparation products and services for consumers and small business owners; Lacerte and ProSeries professional tax products and services, and QuickBooks Premier Accountant Edition and the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program for accounting professionals. In addition, Intuit offers outsourced online banking services for banks and credit unions, as well as Quicken personal finance products and services, Intuit real estate solutions. The company was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Business problem:
Prior to implementing Maven and Nexus Professional, Java projects were mostly built with Ant, and sometimes by the IDE. After migrating builds to Maven, software artifacts were not managed using Nexus. The artifacts were not reliably available and builds were not always reliable.
Intuit employs a software development methodology where geographically distributed teams write, test, and then publish components for local or distributed use. Open source components are also used within the company. In order to support this approach, the company needed a new way to reliably share components. Intuit was looking to improve developer productivity while maintaining control over what third-party artifacts were used by the teams.
Why Maven and Nexus Professional?
In their search for a new solution, Intuit engineers saw that open source artifacts are much easier to manage and build with Maven. They were further convinced by the fact that many open source projects are using Maven.
Intuit chose Nexus Professional based on its higher performance compared to competing products, as well as P2 repository support, staging, and procurement features. Sonatype’s Nexus Professional support was also very important.
Results:
After a transition period following the implementation of Maven, Intuit has begun to standardize company-wide on Maven for building its software. Teams are benefiting from seamless integration with systems such as Sonar, Hudson, and many other tools currently in use inside the company.
Nexus Professional has been providing a very stable platform for repository management of internal and third-party artifacts. Several business units have successfully utilized the staging feature, allowing the teams to be instantly in sync on internally developed artifacts, and virtually eliminating mis-communication about which components should be used for which projects.
By switching to Maven and Nexus Professional, Intuit was able to build a complete Continuous Integration system including testing and static analysis tools with a minimum of effort.
Core benefits of migrating to Maven and Nexus:
- Ability to coordinate component reuse between multiple teams
- Ability to deal with high-complexity projects
- Increased team productivity
- Increased stability of the development infrastructure
Company Profile:
- Intuit Inc., Mountain View, CA
- Web address: www.intuit.com
- Company size: Approx 5000 employees – Number of developers: Approx. 500
- Software used in the environment: Hudson, Sonar, Clover, Perforce, JBoss, Oracle, and others