5 ways to solve your Test Environments Booking Conflicts (with Jira)

It’s going to be great!

It’s now over a week that you and your team could not sleep much, fixing the latest bugs (or let’s call them “show-stoppers”) for this critical business demo of your new app that should hopefully validate months of hard work!

The demo scenario is well oiled and the rehearsal, two hours before the official demo, is a success. The conference room is wide, the projection screen huge, and you can feel the excitement in the audience: finally the top management will discover the new platform!

And then - DISASTER - the server is DOWN…

Wait, is it not today that the Ops team is supposed to upgrade operating systems of your Testing Environments? The answer is in your mailbox: an email received a week ago, still unread due to the golive preparation...

Test Environments are scarce resources

Let’s face it, most companies need (more or less) manual testing to ensure the quality of their releases. And Test Environments are often really scarce resources, because they are are hard and costly to build, configure and maintain end-to-end.

Scarce resources means high demand, and high demand means potential utilization conflicts that have to be smartly managed.

Based on experience, here is what small and large organizations across all kind of industries often put in place to manage Environments Bookings and avoid conflicts:

If there are conflicting Booking Requests on the same time slot, a warning message will be displayed automatically:

An “Open the Timeline” button can link to an Advanced Roadmap view available in Jira Data Center and Jira Cloud. When the Booking Request is submitted, the relevant approver will be notified:

All those fields can be entirely customized, as well as your approval workflow:

The setup explained above will take your Jira Admin less than an hour to implement:

For more information, refer to our documentation (for the Environment field, use a standard multi-select list Jira custom field):

Go further with Jira + Golive

Improve your Environment Booking System in Jira by installing our (paid) Golive Jira App available on the Atlassian Marketplace. You get additional features:

Environment Custom Field

Get a new type of Jira custom field replacing your Jira multi-select custom field, showing you only the list of environments relevant to your current Jira project:

Options are coming from your Environment Inventory that stores important information like the status history, deployments history, specific attributes, etc.

Booking Timeline

Golive comes with a Timeline specifically designed for your Booking System. You can publish it on a Jira dashboard (Timeline Gadget) or a Confluence page:

With this Timeline, it is super easy to get an overview of all Booking Requests and visually check if they are conflicting with other activities scheduled on your environments. Re-scheduling them with drag-and-drop will automatically notify the requesters.

For more information, refer to our Golive documentation:

Conclusion

Managing your non-productive Environments properly is key to your success, and there are 3 options to setup a Booking System:

If you are already using Jira, lucky you! You get 2 additional options:

At Apwide, we have more than 7 years of experience with Test Environment Management and helped many worldwide companies like Nestlé or SwissRe to improve their processes and tools. We are happy to discuss your needs and help you choose the solution that will suit you the most.