“It’s two things: transparency and efficiency. Without Golive, it’s like being in a dark room. You don’t know where to walk, so you keep trying until you find the door. With Golive, you find that light, so you just go straight to the door.” Alexander Asik, Sixsentix
That’s what Alexander from Sixsentix told us during our interview. And honestly, we couldn’t have said it better.
You might think it was scripted, but believe me, it wasn’t. In this article, we’re sharing a real partner perspective on how Golive brings visibility to test environments, improves transparency, and efficiency within complex system landscapes.
So, who’s Alexander?
He’s a QA Consultant at Sixsentix, but that title only covers part of what he does. He also supports business development, works closely with clients as an account manager, and helps shape test architecture strategies. Based in Switzerland, he’s been with Sixsentix for over five years.
Part of our Apwide Trusted Partners, Sixsentix is a quality assurance company with roots in Zurich, with teams spread across the DACH region, Abu Dhabi, Serbia, and Poland. Most of their clients are large organizations in banking, telecom, or retail, and they rely on Sixsentix to take care of QA from end to end. That includes strategy, automation, and tooling, including test environment management with Golive.
In a recent talk with Gabriel from our team, Alexander shared how Sixsentix supports clients facing environment-related challenges. He walked us through what teams are dealing with, how Golive fits into their QA processes, and the difference it makes once it's in place.
Test Environment Management Challenges
What did Sixsentix clients struggled with before Golive?
When teams try to move fast with continuous deployments, things often start to break. Alexander sees it all the time: environments that aren’t ready, applications that go down after a deployment, testers getting blocked, and deadlines slipping because no one knows exactly what’s wrong.
Sometimes it’s a maturity gap. Teams want to adopt CI/CD, but they’re not ready to support it consistently. Other times, it’s the complexity of the system landscape. The more dependencies there are, the harder it gets to understand what’s causing an issue.
“What we see often is that they want to go to the CI/CD too early, where they're not mature enough, and they deploy and deploy, but they constantly shut down their environment, their application, which then again has side effects that testing cannot be completed, and environments are not ready.”
And then comes the real blocker: lack of transparency. As Alexander put it, people know something’s wrong, they just don’t know where it’s coming from.
How do these environment issues affect business outcomes or team performance?
“The obvious one is the availability of the environment, which then has side effects that people are blocked by. You cannot proceed with your activities. But it’s also a frustration in a company. It goes beyond the technical side. You don’t know what’s going on. Things aren’t working, and you don’t know where it’s coming from.”
These problems don’t stay limited to QA or development. As Alexander explained, they spread. Teams get blocked, yes, but what really makes an impact is the uncertainty. Without visibility, no one feels in control. People are left guessing, and that affects how they collaborate, how decisions are made, and how confident teams are in moving forward.
When you recommend Golive to a client facing these challenges, what do you highlight first? Is visibility the main value?
“It’s two things: transparency and efficiency. Without Golive, it’s like being in a dark room. You don’t know where to walk, so you keep trying until you find the door. With Golive, you find that light, so you just go straight to the door.”
Alexander pointed out that the benefit of using Golive becomes even more visible when the setup is complex. He’s worked with different types of clients, from simpler to very broad system landscapes, and it’s in those more complicated environments where Golive really proves its value.
He mentioned how, once Golive is in place, teams start to recognize things they couldn’t see before. They notice that issues often come from the same area or that one environment keeps going down after deployments. He especially highlighted the deployment timeline view, where you can see deployments alongside availability, and it becomes obvious where things are going wrong. A few green environments, some red spots in between, and suddenly, the weak points aren’t just assumptions. They’re clear.
When it comes to implementing Golive, Alexander follows a simple and practical approach. The first step is always to make sure the app is installed and technically ready within the client's Jira environment. Once that's in place, he sets up the basic structure — environments, applications, and the initial views.
He doesn’t start from scratch. Instead, he builds on what’s already there and uses Golive’s default visualizations as a starting point. From there, it’s all about refinement. He brings the proposal to the client, discusses how they want to use it, and fine-tunes the views to match their reality.
What matters most is how far the team wants to go. Some clients use Golive for the basics, just enough to bring clarity. Others go deeper, customizing it to fit their entire QA process. And as Alexander said, the more you use colors and views, the more Golive helps.
Understanding the Implementation Scope at Sixentix
How do you help clients integrate Golive with their existing toolchain?
When asked about integration, Alexander explained that Golive doesn’t require deep changes to existing processes. Since it runs inside Jira, teams don’t feel like they’re adding a new tool. It’s more like enhancing something they already know.
“Everything that Golive brings is on top. It’s not going to disrupt anything existing. From that point of view, it’s easy to install and take this as a hypothesis, and go from there.”
In most cases, the integration is straightforward. If the client already uses Jira for managing their environments or releases, Golive fits naturally into that flow. And for tools like Microsoft Teams, there are built-in options to connect notifications and updates without extra work.
One concern that comes up often is tool fatigue, and Alexander completely relates.
“One obvious concern is that every time new tools, new tools, new tools… Since it’s embedded in Jira, it doesn’t feel like a new tool. It’s just Jira on Steroids. It’s just stronger Jira.”
Golive Benefits
What are the most significant improvements that your customers experienced after implementing Golive?
“You know something is off. That’s a problem. But you couldn’t tell. With Golive, you have the proof. It shows it to you. Look, it’s down all the time. It’s down again. It was down here. You didn't deploy successfully. It was down for another day.”
According to Alexander, one of the biggest improvements clients notice is visibility, not just in theory, but backed by real evidence. Teams stop relying on gut feeling or vague assumptions. Golive gives them data they can point to.
It’s one thing to suspect that something is wrong in an environment. It’s another to see it. Environment availability KPIs, red spots, missing deployments, broken availability, it’s all there. This doesn’t only help fix issues faster; it also strengthens conversations between teams, because now everyone’s looking at the same thing.
At the same time, Alexander doesn't suggest Golive to every client immediately. It depends on the context. The tool works best when there's a specific challenge to solve and a team that’s ready to take ownership of the solution.
In his view, Golive delivers the most value when there's already a level of maturity in place, or when a team is on the way to reaching it. That’s when visibility makes a real difference and leads to long-term results.
Alexander emphasizes that implementing Golive isn’t a one-time effort; it needs ongoing care to stay valuable. After the initial setup, someone on the client side has to take ownership of the tool. That means maintaining it regularly and updating it when changes are needed. Without that ownership, the benefits fade over time.
Apwide Partnership
How would you describe Sixsentix partnership with Apwide?
When we asked Alexander about the partnership, he kept it honest. He said we haven’t worked closely on everything, but during specific implementations, it was pretty close collaboration. The support he got from our team was clear and helpful; whenever something came up, it was answered quickly.
He also mentioned that he likes working with the team. There’s trust, and it feels easy. That trust carried into real moments too, like the time he invited us to the EuroSTAR conference in Antwerp, or when Apwide invited him to Las Vegas at Atlassian Team'24. These weren’t planned as partnership milestones, but they became part of the story.
Alexander said it’s something he wanted to “emphasize and underline.” And we’re glad he did.
What’s next?
This conversation covered a lot, from real-world challenges to how Golive fits into Sixsentix’s projects. But we also asked Alexander to share his thoughts on where environment management is heading.
Coming next: what does our partner think about the future of environment management? Stay tuned for our next article, where we’ll explore different points of view on what’s changing and what that means for teams working with complex systems.
