Enterprise test environment management encompasses a complex range of components and architectures, but traditionally there has not been a solution that provides a consolidated view of environment availability, usage and configuration detail. Without this view, large enterprise customers who can have up to thousands of test environments, struggled to avoid conflicts and mis-configurations, leading to significant financial loss for the business, which can total billions of dollars yearly.
“In a recent survey, over 40% of companies noted that they struggle with test environment availability as a barrier to test automation adoption, which ultimately causes delays in software releases. Conquering the challenges that managing test environments brings is a huge obstacle to achieving DevOps efficiencies in enterprises today,” said Bob Davis, CMO, Plutora. “Plutora Environments, now with new CD Pipeline functionality, is the unsung hero of optimising software release processes by increasing the utilisation that is inherent with maintaining large enterprise test environments.”
Plutora Environments provide real time visibility across the enterprise portfolio to establish a single source of truth to align teams and identify and resolve resource conflicts. Using an interactive environment map, and the new functionality of CD Pipeline, enterprises can create a structure to converge fast-moving continuous delivery activities, helping delivery teams to streamline the progression of code through each phase of a release. The CD Pipeline links GitHub versions, Jenkins jobs, test environments and original change requests to establish visibility of continuous testing workflows at scale.
Analysts agree with the importance of the new capabilities in Plutora Environments, specifically pointing out in Six Trends That Will Shape DevOps Adoption In 2017 And Beyond, an August 2017 Forrester report by analysts Rob Stroud and Eveline Oehrlich, that “the automated [continuous integration and continuous delivery] pipeline is a critical success factor for velocity.” The report goes on to note that, “45% of respondents are automating this pipeline…automated CI/CD pipelines dramatically reduce the time, risk, and expense of software and infrastructure delivery by frequently releasing small batches of changes with excellent visibility and traceability.”
Benefits for Quality Assurance Teams and Test Environment Managers
CD Pipeline allows QA teams to understand specific changes addressed in each build in high velocity release pipelines and remove roadblocks to move code through to delivery as fast as possible by:
- Quickly associating new code commits with the features or fixes the code contains
- Ensuring accuracy of test coverage in high-velocity, multi-application releases
- Tracing updated code to fix defects or original requirements to accurately assign test cases
- Automatically linking change requests to associated test cases to ensure accurate test coverage
Benefits for Release Managers
Plutora Environments’ new CD Pipeline enables release managers to gain visibility and bring accuracy to fast-moving CD pipelines at scale. It also creates traceability, supporting business requirements within DevOps environments by:
- Monitoring product quality in fast-moving, multi-pipeline CD environments
- Providing dashboards that highlight how new code is progressing along the delivery pipeline, providing visibility from inception to production
- Establish traceability of test cases and results to original change requests and associated builds
