Best Practice for Workflows that track deployments across environments

[Brandon Pierce]

Our Infrastructure Operations team is currently moving from a standard Kanban type workflow to something more customized to our actual process.

Specifically, we will receive a request to deploy a change to Production. We will first deploy this change to our lower environments and have the developer verify the change in each environment before it is deployed to Production.

Our pain point currently comes from deploying to a lower environment, waiting for the dev to validate which can often take days/weeks. In the meantime we have this story sitting on our Kanban board which requires we give our PO status updates even though it is not currently actionable by our team.

My current thought exercise as to what I think could work is as follows (we will be utilizing a Jira automation tool):

1. Create a specific issue type for deployments. This will have a workflow that has statuses for "Deploying to Environment X" as well as "Awaiting Dev Review"

2. When a new issue is created with that type, have it auto-generate sub-tasks for deployment to each environment.

3. When a sub task is closed move the issue to "Awaiting Dev Review" and assign issue to the dev who submitted the request.

4. Rinse and repeat until we make it to Production.

Any feedback would be appreciated. Im not sure if Im overthinking here, or missing something simple that could help to improve this process without re-inventing the wheel.

Thanks in advance!