Petrobras' New Dev Culture Proves Even Giants Can Be Nimble

Challenge

Catching up with the Road Runner

Petrobras is committed to leading the energy transition in Brazil and minimizing its carbon footprint. To do so, the company plans to invest $2.1B in digital transformation and innovation.

However, Petrobras digital efforts were slowed down by over 2,000+ legacy apps developed in multiple technologies, from .NET and Java to Delphi, Flex, and Notes.

"We were spending a lot of effort and money just to run operations without developing new features and helping the business," Igor Rigotti, Head of Low-Code explained. "The longer we waited, the higher our technical debt and cybersecurity risks were. We needed to break the cycle—and we needed to do it fast."

Determined to escape this loop and improve business agility, Petrobras sought for low-code.

Working with its Enterprise Architecture team, Petrobras created a model to define what low-code platform was more suitable to address Petrobras' departmental needs versus building corporate and mission-critical solutions. OutSystems was chosen for the latter.

Solution

500+ Professionals and Developers, one Center of Excellence

Unlike companies that struggle with small engineering teams, Petrobras faced a whole different game: With over 100 decentralized development teams working on multiple projects in parallel, how could the company successfully adopt OutSystems, establish a new culture, develop at scale, and ensure a restful night's sleep for everyone involved?

The solution was to create a Center of Excellence (CoE)—a small team of 12 people responsible for overseeing the OutSystems platform. This CoE governs the platform's infrastructure, integrations, and databases, provides best practices, and creates reusable components to be used by over 500 developers spread across the decentralized agile teams.

Thanks to this newfound agility, Petrobras developed 48 applications in just eight months, which included the modernization of legacy systems and brand-new apps.

"We've implemented some control gates to ensure development at scale and quality and compliance with our cybersecurity standards and Security Operations Center," Igor explained. "For example, we need a minimum of 90% in BDD tests before moving to production, and we've integrated our DevOps pipeline with the AI Mentor System. This is how we guarantee a good night of sleep."

Two of the apps developed include the modernization of the employee ID system used by 45,000 collaborators at Petrobras and Sis Fauna, a critical app that manages the environmental impact of Petrobras' offshore operations.

Results

More productivity equals faster ROI

With OutSystems, Petrobras has sped up the release of new solutions and, in this way, expedited the benefits to the business. "We have apps that have achieved 15x ROI in less than one year," shared Igor. "By rolling them in three months, instead of 6-8, that's an extra 3-5 months of reaping the rewards."

Igor has also highlighted another advantage: the rapid ramp-up of junior developers. "Our junior developers in OutSystems work as senior developers would work in high code. They can be back-end developers, front-end developers, integration managers, you name it. And with one-click publish, they can easily handle DevOps and CI/CD."

In the near future, Petrobras plans to take its new agile culture to the next level with the implementation of fusion teams. In this approach, professional developers work with business users to expand development to more sectors of Petrobras while ensuring proper governance.