Ministry of Interior
Background
The Ministry of Interior (MOI) of Kuwait plays a pivotal role in safeguarding national security, maintaining public order,
and ensuring the smooth functioning of civil services. As a cornerstone of the nation's governance, MOI oversees a wide
range of responsibilities — from border control and traffic management to civil defense and public safety.
To meet the evolving demands of digital governance and ensure operational excellence, MOI has embraced a modern DevOps culture,
aligning its software development practices with the principles of agility, automation, and continuous improvement.
Business Needs & Challenges
MOI’s internal development teams are tasked with building and maintaining mission-critical applications that support both
internal operations and citizen-facing services. However, the Ministry faced several challenges:
- Lack of standardized development workflows across teams.
- Delays in deployment cycles due to manual handoffs.
- Difficulty in tracking progress across multiple parallel projects
- Limited collaboration between development, operations, and quality assurance teams.
Characteristics of a viable solution
Obviously, MOI needs to address the following needs:
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Streamline the process of DevOps:
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Adopt an iterative, sprint-based approach to software delivery with clear role definitions
(Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developer, Tester, Release Manager).
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Automate build, test, and deployment workflows to accelerate time-to-value and reduce human error.
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Enable cross-functional teams to work concurrently on shared code bases with real-time visibility.
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Ensure traceability, version control, and structured promotion of releases across environments.
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Empower testers to validate features in isolated builds and report issues directly to developers.
- Perform Release Management on solutions ready to be released or already released.
- Manage source code, while keeping proper versions for backup purposes.
Solution
MOI Partnered with Sharper Software to implement a comprehensive DevOps
Platform, in addition to the SharperSkills Azure DevOps Training in order
to establish a culture of DevOps. Starting as early as the Requirement Gathering stage, up-to and continuously improving Release Management,
Ministry of Interior selected the Agile DevOps Process as the Process Template of Choice.
Development Team Skills Assessment
Sharper Software met with the members of the Development Team and performed one-to-one interviews to arrive at
the current skills of the team. Sharper Software delivered a report to MOI's Management, showing
the gaps in the required skill-set and the suggested assignment of roles and responsibilities. This approach helped
beat the one-resource-per-project challenge.
The Microsoft DevOps Platform
Sharper Software installed and configured Azure DevOps Server on a server platform, as well as Visual Studio
on every development team member's computer. Development Team member computers were configured to connect to and
use Azure DevOps Server. This provided the Development Team members with the latest and coolest tools necessary
to perform their jobs with high productivity.
Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment CI/CD Pipelines
End-to-end pipelines for automated testing, integration, and deployment across staging and production environments.
SharperSkills® Training
The Development Team attended the SharperSkills® Azure DevOps
Hands-On Training to learn how to use Azure DevOps as the DevOps platform. Using a Virtual Machine,
the team acquired a practical knowledge of the features and capabilities of Azure DevOps, without the bore, hassle and
theoretical approach of traditional training. Now, the MOI team is ready to use Azure DevOps for everyday
DevOps.
