How to manage your Testing Environments in Jira

Note: This is a guest post, written by David Berclaz, Apwide’s Co-Founder.

Where are the robots?

When I was a boy, I imagined the year 2000 with flying cars and robots everywhere to execute annoying tasks in place of Humans.
Today, even though we keep hearing about automation and DevOps practices, most companies are still using spreadsheets or wiki pages to manage their Releases and their Test Environments.

In your IT organization, how many times have you heard..?

• “Which version is deployed on the Staging environments?”
• “Where can I test your latest fix? Can you give me the URL?”
• “We have just spent the full day testing the wrong version!”

Many times? Then you are on the right post, keep reading 😉

These kinds of questions come frequently because it is often hard to share information and keep it up to date. The source of information may be an admin console, a spreadsheet or an intranet page. Sometimes, people have access but they prefer to ask – not because they are lazy, but because the information cannot be found easily or is just too complex to understand.
In order to find a way to ease the life of Xray customers dealing with many environments and applications, from v3.2, Xray now provides an integration with Apwide Golive, a powerful Jira app for managing Releases, Environments and Deployments.

We have selected 3 use cases to illustrate the power of this new integration! Read below!

1 – Manage your Release and Test Plans inside Jira

Where do you manage your Release and Test Planning? In a Confluence page? With a Calendar? An Excel File? Are you updating the start/end date manually to plan your Test Plans and Executions?
With Xray’s new Apwide integration, you can plan in Jira and publish it using a Jira dashboard or a Confluence page. Even people without Jira/Confluence accounts can access it and get real-time updates using public dashboards!
Move and resize events on the Timeline with drag and drop and Xray Test Plans/Executions start/end dates are automatically adjusted!

2 – Always test on Stable Environments with the Right Version installed

How can you ensure that you are testing the right version of your applications? And how are you aware when an Environment becomes unstable?
You can get all the real-time information you need inside Xray screens:

• Environment URL
• Environment status (Up, Down, Slow, Unstable?) and history
• Current version deployed and history
• Environment information (owner, location, credentials, etc.)

Moreover, you have the possibility to subscribe to the Environments and events you are interested in, in order to get instant notifications when a new version is deployed, a status is changed, etc.
From now on, you will only test the correct versions on stable and relevant Environments!

3 – Book Environments for your Test Plans/Executions

When Environments are shared across many teams, how can you secure an Environment with the right configuration at the right time for executing your Test Plans/Executions?
Apwide and Xray bring your Jira workflows to the next level:

1. Submit your Booking request (Jira issue type) after selecting the Environments to book and the dates
2. People in charge of the Environments are automatically notified by e-mail. They will be able to:
   1. Visualize Booking request conflicts and fix them on an interactive Timeline
   2. Plan the correct version deployment and data refresh in a few clicks
   3. Approve your booking request
3. As soon as your request is approved (or rejected), you get an instant notification and you can start planning/executing Tests in Xray!

Ready to bring your Environment and Release Management to the next level?

Check Apwide’s installation tutorial and check the first Xray-Apwide webinar.