Five distributed scrum teams totaling over 50 people across multiple locations worked together using the SAFe framework to develop an enterprise solution for GDPR compliance for Mastercard on tight deadlines. Key aspects that led to their success included using self-managed feature teams, establishing strong synchronization and communication plans, fostering a DevOps culture, and emphasizing high quality engineering practices like 100% in-sprint automation testing. These efforts helped deliver business value to both Mastercard and EPAM through on-time delivery, reduced release cycles, and increased customer satisfaction and new business opportunities.

1. GDPR Distributed
Team
J u n e 2 9 , 2 0 1 9

2. GDPR (General Data Protection
Regulation)
2

3. EU General Data Protection Regulation ( GDPR)
3
OVERVIEW
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has brought a major disruption to so many businesses. The regulation came into force on 25th May of 2018
with an aim to drastically increase the transparency in the data processing methods of any worldwide business that handles the data of EU citizens

4. GDPR: Enabling Data Access As Enterprise Capability
4
• GDPR is the most critical regulatory program and the it is truly built by 5 distributed scrum teams totaling 50+ people across Hyderabad, US and Pune
against changing requirements and tight deadlines
• Executed using SAFe framework enabled with CICD/DevOps, automation, advanced monitoring and
• technology consolidation
• 9 PI cycles delivered with 100% Objectives, A+ code quality, 0% technical debt, 90+% code coverage, 100% In-Sprint automation,
GDPR Success Story using distributed development team model
5 distributed self-managed Feature teams
SAFe Framework and ATDD methodology
90% -95%+ Test Automation Coverage
100% in-sprint automation approach
CI/CD for automated deployments, daily regression and SONAR
Increased Collaboration, Transparency and Productivity
zero (0) customer facing production defects
GDPR Solution Highlights
leveraging distributed team
model

5. PROBLEM STATEMENT
&
KEY CHALLENGES
5

6. DISTRIBUTED TEAM
6
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
Poor Communication
Lack of Cohesiveness
No Sense of Belonging
Post Implementation Feedback
Lack of Trust
Lack of Productivity
Alignment
What Challenges do Distributed teams face ?
• Agile philosophy works very well for small, collocated
teams, but often struggles to build “One team”
mindset when the teams are distributed.
• Majority of challenges comes into picture in terms of
dependencies , Cross-cultural communication issues,
lack of face to face communication, fear of conflict,
absence of trust etc.

7. Problem Statement
• In 2017, Mastercard engaged EPAM to implement end-to-end
enterprise solution for GDPR compliance. This included
development and implementation of:
• Enterprise global consent initiative
• Data access initiative
• Privacy profile management initiative
• Support 200 + products , legacy systems
• Business scalability to onboard 1000+ future products
• With unknown scope definition, we had to implement the solution
within tight deadlines (8 months), while still maintaining high
standards of delivery
7

8. • Regulatory project for EU with support for multiple geographies
• Huge financial loss if compliance guidelines are not met
• Complex architecture with latest technology
• 200+ products with which the application had to interact and collect the
data to process
• Provision for onboard ‘closed legacy products’
• Different products with different methods of communication
• Unknown scope with non-negotiable timeline – May 2018
• Technical implementation had begun while business requirements
were still evolving
• No ramp-up time for the team
• Geographically distributed teams
KEY CHALLENGES
8

9. SOLUTION MATURITY
9

10. Key Success Factors of distributed teams
10
A feature team is a long-lived,
cross-functional, cross-component
team that is capable of delivering
end-to-end a customer-centric
features.
All the stakeholders customer, offshore
team, onshore team have SAFe
standardized communication plans at
multiple levels which keep them in sync
• Scaling AGILE with SAFe
• Fostering DEVOPS culture
• Delivering business value
SELF-MANAGED FEATURE TEAMS
ESTABLISHED SYNCHRONIZATION AND
COMMUNICATION PLAN AGILE AND DEVOPS CULTURE
KEEP TEAM MOTIVATED AND
ENGAGED
Engaging team in knowledge sharing
session, celebration of Success keeps
them motivated
All the teams have a common
understanding and agreement on the
best practices and standards they adopt
and follow.
HIGH QUALITY ENGINEERING

11. 11
SELF-MANAGED FEATURE TEAMS
Lean-Agile Mindset:
• Enabled Lean-Agile Mindset shift, providing a rapid feedback loop between the drivers of business requirements and
developers transforming them into solutions
• A feature team is a long-lived, cross-
functional, cross-component team that
are capable of delivering end-to-end a
customer-centric features. One of the
key important aspects of a successful
Agile setup is having a self-organizing
feature team.
• GDPR has 5 such features team
delivering values for last 7+ PI
SUMMARY KEY HIGHLIGHTS
Building Trust:
• GDPR built around highest performing teams are those based on trust by brining team together, conducting team building activities and
celebrating every small achievement…more on slide
• Created transparency by having strong communication and Collaboration using Skype, Video Conf, Flowdock. Regular communication on
challenges, project statues, risks, team movement etc
Establish a Shared Project Vision
• Ensuring Participation in PI planning by all teams emphasizes in aligning development to business goals with the business
context, Roadmap and Vision
• All Event attendees which includes Business Owners, Product Management, Agile Teams, System and Solution
Architect/Engineering, the System Team commit to Program PI objectives
Enhanced Team Collaboration
• Flowdock tool used to share the information and Collaboration
• Skype for Business for Audio/Video communication
• Measure “How Agile we are” through Rally

12. ESTABLISHED SYNCHRONIZATION AND
COMMUNICATION PLAN
Feature team Sync-up / Events Governance Team Sync-up
Product Manager and PO Connect Inspect and Adapt at PI end
• All the stakeholders customer, offshore team, onshore team have SAFe standardized communication plans at multiple levels which keep them
in Synch.
SUMMARY
I N P U T S TO P I
• Business context to highlight current state of Business
and solution to address the business need.
• Roadmap and Visions in terms of top 10 Features of the
Program Backlog with planned Business values .
O U T P U T O F P I
• Committed PI objectives with the business value assigned by the Business Owners.
• Program board with new feature delivery dates, feature dependencies among teams and
with other ARTs, and relevant Milestones.
• Reflection of Previous PI in terms of actual Business values delivered to Business.
• Daily standup
• Sprint planning to plan the Sprint.
• Retrospectives and sprint demo/review
• Scrum of Scrums
• System Demo at Iteration end
• Weekly Architect and leads touch point
• Weekly connect with BizOps, Governance and Product team
• Touchpoints among Product Manager, Chief PO and team POs
• Strategize backlog from a business perspective, system perspective,
technical perspective
• Formal PI System demo
• Teams then reflect and identify improvement backlog items via a
structured, problem-solving workshop
P I P L A N N I N G
An intense two days event for aligning all the teams on the ART to a shared Mission and Vision facilitated by RTE. PI planning
helped brining all 6 GDPR teams distributed across US, India to a common vision.

13. 13
AGILE AND DEVOPS CULTURE
DevOps cultureAgile Culture
VALUEADD
• Continuous Integration and releases
• Detects build issues immediately
• Monitoring & Gating
• Build-state always Green
FOSTERING DEVOPS CULTURE
Improving business value by Reducing silos and fostering
collaboration
DELIVERING BUSINESS VALUE
Agile and DevOps ecosystem to faster continuous delivery of
business value
• Accelerate Time to Market
• Accelerating Team Velocity
• Business Benefit
• Improvement in customer experience
• Enhanced software quality
• Consistent agile approach
• Enterprise vision and strategy alignment
• Large-scale and complex projects
• Delivering value at consistent cadence
• Manage cross-team dependencies
SCALING AGILE WITH SAFe
Bringing System thinking, lean and Agile principles, values and
benefits to the wider enterprise
Business value

14. 14
STRONG QUALITY GATE FREQUENT FEEDBACK
• Quality Gate rated ‘A’
• 100% in-sprint Automation
• Functional test coverage is 96%+
• 90%+ Unit test Coverage
• Schedule jobs to run regression
• Feedback during Sprint Grooming
• Feedback at Developers’ machines by IDE and Plugins
for static code analysis (for example Sonar Lint )
• Gated Continuous Delivery through Pre-commit hooks,
Unit testing, code review, Automatic Regression
• Feature level End to End testing by PO
• Sprint Demo and System Integration Demo
• System Integration testing, Acceptance testing,
Security testing, performance testing
HIGH QUALITY ENGINEERING
• All the teams have a common understanding and agreement on the best practices and standards they adopt and follow. This includes
development procedures, code standards and styles, patterns, and other best practices that result in an extensible, quality productSUMMARY

15. 15
Engaging Beyond project
activities
Celebrations and Fun activities
• Participate other events like
Hackathon, Global Code Retreat
• Presentation in Tech-Talk
• Celebrate for every success for examples
any prod release
• Organize FUN activities ( Friday Fun),
Potluck , Team outing
• Celebrate monthly Birthday
KEEP TEAM MOTIVATED AND ENGAGED
Engaging team in knowledge sharing session, celebration of Success keeps them motivatedSUMMARY
Cross knowledge sharing
• Regular knowledge sharing session
across teams
• Dedicated mentor for new joiner and
providing periodic feedback

16. CI JENKINS
GDPR CI/CD Pipeline – Engineering Excellence
CI/Build
Server
Builds / Status
Notifications
CI
Dashboard
QA
Private
Cloud VMs
PROD
approv
al
gatewa
y
Production
Deployment
Quality
gatewa
y
START
FINISH
UI Automation
Tests
Mock /
Unit Tests
Сode
Analysis
Build Tools
Stage 1 /
UAT Stage 2 /
MTF
PROD
Securit
y check
App Release Automation
Command Dispatching
Configuration Mgmt
• ARA based CI CD pipeline reduced effort and accelerated releases
• Implementing Unit Tests for CI/CD pipeline, first time on MasterCard projects
• Backup and restore feature in deployment pipeline
• Highest results were achieved by using MasterCard infrastructure and resources, without usage of any external tools

17. CHARACTERISTICS THAT DISTINGUISHES
GDPR
17

18. Unique Characteristics that distinguishes GDPR from the rest
18
• 100% In-Sprint is a criteria of Story acceptance
and is achieved consistently
• Dev/QE collectively identify test scenarios
clearly while developing early Enhanced higher
quality
• Reduced release cycle by shifting testing to left
• Zero defect policy is a part of Definition of
Done (DOD) of stories
• This helps significantly in reducing defects
in higher environments
• Consecutive 6 prod releases with almost
zero defects
• CICD pipeline established till stage ( Prod
restricted by client)
• Release Cycle reduced from 4 weeks to 1 week
• Build-state always Green by monitoring and
Quality Gating
100% In-Sprint Automation Zero In-Sprint Defects Matured CICD Pipeline
Automated Production health Check
• Enabled lightweight sanity test suite for
prod validation for BizOps team to run
• Helps in quick health check of production
post deployment
• API Regression to be Green for Story
acceptance .
• Strong collaboration across teams to
bring the regression green in case of
failure due to new changes
API Regression on Story Acceptance

19. BUSINESS VALUE FOR CLIENT
19

20. • Client
• Reshape the way Client as an Organization approaches data privacy of their consumers
• Enables Client to meet the data privacy rights of the consumers as laid out in GDPR
regulation
• Compliance with GDPR regulation and maintain Brand value and Trust with their
consumers
• Consumers:
• Protects and empowers all EU citizens data privacy rights
• Rights to data access
• Rights to be forgotten
• Right to data alteration
GDPR project received Card CEO award for 2018
4% REVENUE ($450M) SAVED BY THIS RELEASE
Increasing Brand value with being compliant with GDPR
20

21. • SLA driven product development for higher code quality and lower
tech debt:
• PCI (Payment Card Industry Standard) compliant code
• MVP deployed to production ahead of schedule
• <1% tech debt
• 100% in-sprint automation
• 95%+ regression test automation
• 25 % velocity increase in a span of 1 year
• Increased customer satisfaction resulted in account growth
PLATFORM WITH LATEST TECHNOLOGY
4 TO 1 WEEK RELEASE CYCLE REDUCTION
21

22. BUSINESS VALUE FOR EPAM
22

23. An Agile Shift @EPAM
23
• Built a robust Agile and DevOps culture at epam that can be extended to other projects and
teams
• Expertise working in Distributed agile teams using safe framework
• Built a great customer relationship and trust that generated new business opportunities for
epam
• Turned this account into the largest account from India within a short timeframe
• Team gained expertise on latest tools and design aspects

24. 24
R ATA N DA S
Sr. Project Manager