Have you ever gone down the path of testing the latest release of an application only to find out that you had the wrong version?
Maybe you accidentally grabbed the wrong build or you didn’t have the correct configuration file for the environment you were testing against—or your database wasn’t updated correctly, or the script you were using was still pointing to a prior version of the software.
Whatever the case, we can agree that keeping track of all the various artifacts, database schema changes, configuration parameters and other components needed to accurately test and deploy an application is both time-consuming and prone to errors.
Today, many companies are looking to DevOps, continuous delivery and agile development methodologies to shorten their application delivery cycles and reduce the number of errors and the costs associated with application deployment processes. Nearly all enterprise companies are software companies, and their mere existence depends on delivering differentiating products and services via software to their customers.
It’s imperative to be able to react to customer demands and competitive pressures quickly, if not immediately, to stay ahead of the competition. Gone are the days of yearly release cycles.
Today we see companies deploying new capabilities into production environments on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. At some companies, hundreds, if not thousands, of deployments are occurring across dev, test and production environments daily. The old methodologies we once used simply can’t support this type of volume and cadence.
Employing Release Automation
So, how are these companies transitioning to this new way of thinking? In a word—automation; specifically, by automating early and often.
Everything about your release process is a candidate for automation. This includes environment provisioning and configuration automation, build automation, test automation and release and deployment automation.
A customer of ours recently implemented CA Release Automation, and within eight weeks had automated 90 percent of its deployments. Deployments that once took more than five hours and a team of people now take a matter of minutes.
“This not only saves us a huge amount of time, but it also mitigates the risk of human error being introduced by manual processes,” said Tim Dallmann, platform engineer at Jewelers Mutual.
Another customer, a major airline, implemented CA Release Automation and immediately reduced their production outages from an average of 237 over a three-month period, down to 15, seven, six and five over the following four months.
And Molina Medicaid Solutions reduced their cost of human error by 90 percent, all the while responding quicker to emergency deployment requests and improving deployment quality.
Automation is critical, but I believe these results prove that implementing a framework to manage and deploy release processes in addition to automation works even better.
Increased Flexibility and Visibility
Continuous delivery helps break down barriers often seen between development and operations teams. It provides, even forces, a more collaborative approach and automation is a key enabler of this.
“One of the best things about automation is that it gives us the flexibility to skill-up end users—deployments in our test environments are no longer solely the responsibility of the operations or IT teams,” explained Dallmann.
With an application release automation (ARA) solution, artifact, build, configuration and release processes are no longer tracked with spreadsheets or embedded in complicated scripts.
Increased visibility into these processes ultimately enables all stakeholders to take a more active role in the release process, and access to real-time information can significantly reduce the amount of time and resources needed to resolve and recover from problems when they do occur.
Automation leads to:
Integrating with the Ecosystem
An enterprise ARA solution can help you create a single control point to streamline all your application delivery processes for better predictability and reduced risk. A critical component of this is the ability to integrate and orchestrate tools and technologies required along the continuous delivery pipeline, including source control, automated testing tools, provisioning and configuration management solutions and change management and performance management solutions.
Integration with an application lifecycle management solution can provide even further alignment, governance and traceability between development projects and what is ultimately being tested and promoted to production.
“By integrating the two solutions, we will have a complete audit trail of deployments to help us understand how, where and by whom stories have changed,” said Phil Nickolai, director of application services at Jewelers Mutual.
“What we really needed was a solution to streamline our whole way of working,” he said. “We had numerous people working on projects, competing for resources and causing complexity. Now we’re back in control and getting smarter every day.”
The Time Is Now
Let’s get rid of the problem that exists between the keyboard and information kept in spreadsheets, scripts or emails. Not only will you stop wasting time testing the wrong version of an application, but you can also ensure you have the right test data, the appropriate test cases and the correct configuration parameters for your environment.
Stress-inducing release weekends and nights become a thing of the past. Developers can spend more time on developing innovative capabilities that generate revenue and keep customers coming back for more.
