Environment Hub in Jira: Live Demo from the Atlassian User Group

by David Berclaz // Last updated on December 11, 2023  

Aug Tel Aviv 1

In May 2019, I had the pleasure to talk about Test Environment Management at the Israeli Atlassian User Group in Tel Aviv. Discover the story behind Apwide and how Nestlé Nespresso saved millions by improving its Test Environment Management. 

Whether you just started or are already advanced with your Environment Management, get some inspiration with this live demo. 

In 2013, Nestlé Nespresso failed at managing its Releases and Environments 

Early 2010, Nestlé Nespresso started an ambitious project. The objective? Replace its legacy eCommerce platform with a brand new platform to rollout in more than 40 countries. The initial team of 15 contractors (developers, testers, project managers, etc.) soon becomes 150, dispatched in 5 remote locations. 

Test Environment Management Questions

Many micro-services are developed and drastically increase the technical landscape complexity. New comers are lost and we keep hearing the same kind of questions from team members:

  • Which version is deployed on the Staging environments?
  • Where can I test your latest fix? Can you give me the URL?
  • We have just spent the full day testing the wrong version!
Nestle Nespresso Tooling

At that time we use the Atlassian suite (Jira Software, Confluence, Bitbucket, Hipchat), Jenkins (for deployments), Puppet (for configuration management) and HP ALM (for testing, later it will be replaced by Xray for Jira).

However, for Release and Environment Management we use:

  • MS Project for our Release Plans, exported in PDF to be stored on the intranet
  • Emails (in fact loads of emails) to communicate release activities ("We have just deployed the version 6.4 in STG", "We are postponing the deployment of 6.5 in INT by 1 day", "The security scan started this morning", etc.) 
  • Excel Spreadsheets to capture the list of our Environments and the versions deployed

So, how to improve?

We desperately search tools to help us with our Release and Environment Management.

Tools

There are solutions out there, but they are heavy to install and configure. Or poorly integrated with the toolchain we use. We take a step back and notice that all our team members and stakeholders have access to Jira and Confluence.

Those tools are extremely powerful for dashboards and workflows, why not showing all useful information there?

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On our free time, we build a free Jira app to manage our list of Environments in Jira. We can quickly replace our Excel Spreadsheets with a single source of truth: a list of all our Environments with the versions deployed, updated in real time thanks to an integration with Jenkins!

The next step is to build a Booking system so that every Jira user can book an Environment with the necessary approval workflow and check the potential conflicts. It works like a charm and we get more and more companies using our Jira app. It saves them millions!

Now watch the live demo!
Atlassian User Group, Tel Aviv, 19/05/2019


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Transform your Test Environment Management with Apwide Golive:

  • Never hunt for environment info again,
    it's all in Jira where your team already is!
  • Say goodbye to environment booking conflicts,
    and hello to seamless test campaigns and demos
  • Keep your inbox organized,
    by choosing the environment notifications you need via email, MS Teams or Slack
  • Streamline your environment planning,
    with easy drag-and-drop on an intuitive timeline

Leading companies have already Golive as part of their DevOps toolchain:

Southwest Airlines Company
Mercedes-Benz Company
Manulife Financial Corporation Is A Canadian Multinational Insurance Company And Financial Services Provider.
Sky Television Company
Barclays Bank

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About the author

David Berclaz

After working for large organizations like Deloitte and Nestlé Nespresso, David co-founded Apwide in order to help organizations improve their Test Environment Management processes.

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