When Capital One started to roll out agile development in 2011, Wolfs said it amounted to just one percent of software that was delivered. Today, 85 percent of software is delivered by the agile method. With agile, Capital One now also releases approximately 400 product releases a month, has cut delivery times to three to six months while “cutting costs significantly” and has 95 percent of products meet expectations on the first release, according to Wolfs.
That 400 releases figure speaks to the scale of the applications supported in large banks. Getting a handle on the population of custom written software (that is, NOT package software in use, but software the enterprise has written itself) is difficult, so tracers like this are helpful.