Appian Continous Delivery Framework

Business Challenge

  • Inability to respond to the increasing business demands for new features and functionality
  • Long delays in making minor development changes or additions to existing production applications
  • Regimented quarterly release cycles due to lengthy test and regression cycles
  • Inability to innovate at pace

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Solution Overview

ACD utilizes Appian’s BPM platform to achieve the Automated Build, Automated Test and Automated Deployment of an application. It provides a single view of the Release Orchestration process across various environments i.e. Development, System Integration Test, System Acceptance Test, User Acceptance Test and Production. ACD considers a Release as a ‘Process’ within Appian and tracks it end-to-end, enforcing best practices on the following lines:

  • Pre-Deployment Code quality checks in Development including ability to upload validation scripts
  • Leverage Appian’s Batch Testing modules to validate the build in Development, prior to deployment
  • Automatic creation of the build within Development for deployment
  • Automated Deployment of the build to upstream environments using tools like IBM uDeploy, Jenkins and CA‘s Release Automation
  • Cross-check deployment by comparing validation rules and automated testing results across environments
  • Automated Smoke and Functional Testing of the build in higher environments using tools like Selenium and FitNesse
  • Generation of release notes and other build artefacts, related to the release

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Solution Benefits

  • Deploys applications with lower risks and fewer failures
  • Provides a 360° view of all release processes, deployments and build levels across multiple environments
  • Performs automated smoke testing before and after deployments
  • Automates quality checks before and after deployment for each build
  • Performs full regression tests as required in each environment
  • Sends real time notifications and alerts of the deployment statuses
  • Uses out of the box connectors to integrate with commonly used test automation tools like Selenium and FitNesse
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