Release planning - figuring out how to get a clean pipeline for deployment.

Steve Kingdon

Hi there

I'm a scrum master and don't come from a development background.

I'm now in charge of looking after releases for a middleware/API platform.

Issue is I'm struggling to figure out what environment a particular story has been deployed to and tested in, without diving into GitLab, in order to create a clean pipeline to deploy to production. 

We use a locally hosted JIRA instance and GitLab in a dev-ops environment. We have the following environments: DEV, UAT, and PROD, multiple remote teams working on the same code-base, and no feature branching.

We QA in DEV, integration test in UAT and smoke test after PROD deployments.

Currently our swim lanes end at Done in DEV, then the story loses visibility to us once pushed to UAT, as often another team will test our functionality from their front-end; sometimes we can integration test in UAT. 

Any advice gratefully welcomed. 

Regards,

Steve.

Bob Swanson

Hi Steve,

I think you have been placed in a difficult position since a scrub master is clearly a dev role.  Your new role is now a DevOps manager.  I would do research on that job discription. I'm in DevOps.  Now you need to be the referee for dev, ops and qa.  There is no right or wrong way to do this. What you do need to do is split up the code into development, testing and production that makes all three groups happy.  One place to start is to have Dev only move code to testing and testing can only move tested code to production.  To help enforce the new rules is to segment groups into vlans so dev can't reach production.  At least it's some where to start.