This guest blog was written by David Berclaz and Guillaume Vial, co-founders at Apwide.
If you are part of a QA team, no doubt you have heard the following complaints more than once:
- “Which version is deployed on the Staging environments?”
- “Where can I test your latest fix? Can you give me the URL?”
- “Do not touch the Pre-Prod until next Tuesday and notify me of any change made on it.”
- “Who refreshed the Staging?!? I now need to redo my entire setup!”
- “We have just spent one full day testing the wrong version…”
Unfortunately, these comments are all too common. However, enterprises can’t afford to have a breakdown in communications in this era of DevOps. You need to be prepared to launch a new version at least every two or three weeks to stay competitive.
It’s not a good sign that most companies still are using spreadsheets or wiki pages to manage test environments and releases. Even with Jira, Confluence, ChatOps, Cloud and DevOps, some organizations still are wasting much effort on Test Environments issues.
Fortunately, Apwide Golive’s vision seamlessly improves your DevOps and collaboration processes around Release and Environment Management. With an easy to use interface where the entire testing process can be centralized, communications remain crystal clear for your team.
Test Environment management strategy #1: Centralize your Environments’ information in Jira
Apwide gives your team the power to centralize all the test environments’ information and configuration into a structured and searchable repository within Jira Software and Jira Core. It also allows your team members to easily update their deployed versions and statuses.
This would definitely be a huge benefit for your organization, especially if every single user could subscribe to notifications per environment and per type of event, interacting in the context of Jira issues. And at some point you would likely need to communicate broadly across your entire organization – this can be done easily with Jira and Confluence gadgets. Finally, you can start managing your communications around your Test Environments the DevOps way.
Test Environment management strategy #2: Easily plan, book, and organize your Environments
Your environments are living resources as they are continuously evolving over time. With a very intuitive interface, Apwide gives you the possibility to navigate in your deployments, status history and manage your Environment booking requests on a timeline using drag and drop.
The organization of all your activities using customizable calendars has never been more simple. In a few clicks, you can publish you Release plan using Jira and Confluence gadgets, and even display Environments’ events feeds in your favourite Calendar app (Outlook, iCal, Google, Notes, etc.). Again, this information can be shared with the entire organization so everyone remains in the loop.
Test Environment management strategy #3: Integrate and Automate to unleash a compelling DevOps process
Environments’ data is usually spread over multiple external tools. Apwide does not replace them, but rather provides a friendly REST API (including Swagger definition) and Webhooks to integrate with:
- Build and Deployment tools (ex: Bamboo, Jenkins, custom scripts)
- Configuration and provisioning tools (ex: Puppet, Chef, Docker)
- Monitoring tools (ex: Nagios, Splunk, DataDog)
- Testing tools (ex: Xray)
Get your Test Environment management strategy right
With Jira and Apwide, you’ll know you are giving your team the tools they need to improve their DevOps processes, ensuring your organization’s competitive advantage.
For more information, take a look on our YouTube channel or visit us on the Atlassian Marketplace to start your free trial of Apwide. Of course, you can always contact Valiantys to get consulting on our tools from certified Atlassian consultants.
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