Two identical Bamboo build plans (Prod & Test) behave differently. One is not functional.

Question

I have two build plans for the same project. A prod and a test. They both pull code from the same repository, have the same configuration, versioning, staging, connect to two different AWS EC2 instances, and are connected to two different databases, one that is the live Prod one for Prod, and one that is a Test (where we test different things in the db) for the test.

So the only big difference would be the fact that they are connected to two different databases.

When I run the prod, I have no issues.There is a dropdown that when clicked, shows a list of entries.

When I run the test, it rusn, but the dropdown never populates anything. No error. Although one single time I did see a 503 error in the console, but that was about it.

My question is pretty obvious. If I have two identical build plans on Bamboo, and the prod version seems stable, how come my Test version is not functional? Could it be that the databases are different? Could it be AWS related? It is driving me nuts. They have the same code base, same Maven versions, same Java version, the same exact staging and order of stages.

How can I get my Test build plan to work exactly the same way as my Prod build plan?

Jimmy Seddon · Answer

Thank you for clarifying, at this point there are two things I'd recommend checking:

1) Do you have any environment specific configurations that could cause something to be different?  I know that we have things like environment specific DB connection strings which if they aren't replaced correctly will cause failures.

2) Check the Bamboo log for the Test plan for a false positive.  We use a lot of Powershell scripts.  If we incorrectly handle the errors, Bamboo can mistake the build as having succeeded when in fact an error was thrown that actually prevented the deployment from completing.

I hope that helps!

-Jimmy

Adrian Muresan · Answer

Hi Jimmy,

Thanks for your answer. However, the build plan doesn't fail in Bamboo.

They both run successfully. The difference is that when I'm accessing the prod website, I click on a dropdown and it populates the list with entries.

When I do the same thing in test, nothing happens, no entries loaded, and not even an error.

This even runs on my local environment which uses the QA database.

The only place this dropdown is not functional is the Test environment, which is configured the same way as the Prod build plan in Bamboo.

So how come the Prod Bamboo build plan is functional while the Qa Bamboo build plan is not ?

Jimmy Seddon · Answer

Hi @Adrian Muresan,

Welcome to the Community!

What I would do in this situation is start by disabling all of the jobs & tasks in your "Test" build plan.  Then I would start adding them back one at a time starting with the source code checkout until the build fails, this what you know what task/job is causing this to fail.

From there, it would depend on what is causing things to fail, but you should be able to focus your troubleshooting efforts on a more specific problem.

I hope that helps get you started!

-Jimmy