Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery
Current Deployment Process
Challenges
- With the traditional deployment approach the turnaround time required between various environments is extended. Example: after QA sign-off a deployment needs to be scheduled for UAT
- Due to lengthy regression test cycles, regimented quarterly release cycles are available, which leads to significant waiting time
- Monitoring/maintaining multiple environments with up-to-date code
- Difficulty in establishing coordination between development, testing, and operations teams Example: missed status update in Jira but code is deployed and available for testing
- Resource availability/dependency at a particular phase of the project lifecycle
Future Process
Solution Overview:
- CI/CD framework is used to automate the entire deployment journey
- Developers and testers work simultaneously, and Jira acts as a source of truth
- Testers write Cucumber scripts, tag with Jira ticket number, and push the code to GitHub
- The developer provides the solution to the problem in Appian and pushes the code to the Test environment using Appian's 'Compare and Deploy' feature
- Jenkins takes over after this point, connecting all systems and triggering the next activity in the workflow. Outcomes are monitored and updates are shown in Jira
Benefits:
- The model supports BDD(Behaviour Driven Development) approach. Both the testing and development teams can start working together
- Jira Integration - helps in keeping track of work, sends real-time notifications and alerts
- Highly Flexible - pipeline can be customized based on the customer's need
- Automatically triggers DevOps pipeline once developer integrated the code on the test environment
- CI/CD framework provides a Graphical representation of cucumber test cases
- Capable of running full regression suite before production deployment
- The release can contain multiple builds e.g. database scripts and customization files
- The model leverages Appian's Compare and Deploy utility for continuous integration
- The solution leverages Appian's Programmatic Deployment API rather than the Automated Deployment Manager plugin(soon to be deprecated)