1. Integrity Developer Team Promotion Process

2. What is the process about?
As a developer working on changes for a solution, you have made changes on the development Integrity servers DEV and STAGING. These changes are tracked in the Integrity Dev Tasks (IDTs) which are related to a Change Request created by a user.
When you make a change to any Admin Object, it needs to be pushed from DEV to STAGING and then finally to PROD.
Although there are a handful of people with permission to perform admin migrations, a single “Promotion Master” is chosen each day to take care of those duties.

3. What kinds of changes are tracked?
Note: this is a list of things which are not “Admin Objects” (ie not pushed via the Admin Migration Wizard) but are still tracked in the Admin Objects field:
Excel Gateway Mapping template file
Report Resource (pictures)
Trigger Script File
WEB File
An admin object is one of the following:
- Admin Query
- Admin Report
- Chart
- Dashboard
- Dynamic Group
- Field
- Group
- Item Presentation Template
- Project
- State
- Trigger Configuration/Rule
- Type
- User
- Viewset

4. How do I track changes to these objects?
Once a user’s request for changes to a solution are approved, an Integrity Dev Task is created and related to a Change Request.
This IDT has several fields which will hold the information about your changes.
As your changes are worked on, you will transition the IDT through the workflow and your changes can be tracked. This is important for letting the Promotion Master know whether or not your changes are ready to be pushed to Staging.

5. What do the fields on the IDT mean?
Overview Tab:
Summary – Copied from the summary of the Change Request.
State – Shows where the IDT is in its workflow. Note: To have your IDT show-up in the promotion-current query and be considered for promotion, the state must be set to “Ready to Stage”.
Assigned User – The user assigned to work on the IDT.
Planned Delivery Date – This is when the IDT is planned on being promoted. Note: This is another field which must be set in order to show-up in the promotion-current query. It must have a value of that day’s date to be considered for promotion.
Discussion and General Comments – These fields are there for you to keep notes on the IDT and track discussions about it that you have had.

6. What do the fields on the IDT mean?
Implementation Tab:
Implementation Details – A field where you detail the changes you have made (eg. Create new field “FieldA” and added it to the Widget type). Contains any pertinent details about the changes you made.
Pre- and Post-Migration Steps - Enter information here to let the person performing the promotion know if they need to do anything special before or after pushing the admin objects (eg. After pushing the changes for the Widget type, run the “Widget Components” query and remove Widget123 from the items which have that inactive pick list value).
Admin Objects Changed – These are the fields where you select the admin objects which you have made changes to. This tells the promotion master which objects to push to Staging.

7. What do the fields on the IDT mean?
Verification Tab:
Test Cases – This is where you can put a description of how to test your changes. Remember, some people are not familiar with the objects that you have changed and this can be helpful in letting your tester know what behavior to expect from your changes!
Peer Review – This field is used to flag whether someone else needs to peer review code for things such as trigger scripts. Peer reviewers are anyone on the Integrity Admin Team.
Test Results – This field is for the testers who test your changes. They will fill it in with details saying that testing went well or they will point out any problems encountered. You may have to go back and resolve the problem before the migration cutoff or have the change pushed during tomorrow’s window.

8. What do the fields on the IDT mean?
Attachments Tab:
Attachments – This is where you can store attachments such as trigger scripts or text files. Sometimes this is helpful in keeping track of your work.
Workflow Tab:
This tab displays the workflow for the IDT item.

9. I’ve made my changes and filled-out my IDT. Now what?
1) After making sure that your IDT is in the Ready to Stage state and has a Planned Delivery Date of today, the promotion master will recognize it as a candidate for today’s promotion. After the cutoff of 11:30am, they will send out an asking for testing to start on the IDTs listed in the promotion-current query.
2) At this point, you can help test someone else’s work. Take a look at the Test Steps field on someone else’s IDT and see what the expected behavior is. If you have questions, speak to the person who made the changes.
3) If you find that there are problems with the change and they should not be pushed into Production, let the Promotion Master and the developer know as soon as possible. In most cases, the developer can fix the problem very quickly and the change can be re- migrated.
4) If you find that there are no problems with the changes, set the State of the IDT to “Ready for Deployment”. This lets the Promotion Master know that the IDT has been fully tested and can be pushed to Production.
5) Continue testing until there are no more IDTs to test and then start working on changes for the next day.

10. Promotion Master Duties

11. Promotion Master Duties
The Promotion Master of the day sends an out first thing in the morning to the Integrity Developer Team, asking that everyone has their Integrity Dev Task (IDT) items correctly set to appear in the “promotion-current” query. They must appear in the query by the cutoff deadline of 11:30am Eastern otherwise that change does not get pushed that day unless approved as an out-of-window promotion by a manager as a critical bypass migration.
At 11:30am once everyone has all of their changes submitted to be pushed as indicated by their IDTs in the query, the changes are then migrated to STAGING. You do this by opening the Integrity Administration Client, connected to DEV, right-clicking on the Workflows and Documents node, and selecting “Launch Admin Migration Wizard”.

12. Promotion Master Duties
When the Admin Migration Wizard launches, make sure you do not select “Include User Notifications” and on the next screen, select the radio button “Do not migrate the field and state overrides that refer to the newly created Types selected below:” and select all Types in that box just as you see in the screenshot below. Click Next.

13. Promotion Master Duties
Next, you will see a screen where you can select Admin Objects which have not yet been migrated from the DEV server to STAGING. To ensure that you are choosing the correct objects to be pushed, refer to the promotion-current query and look at the Artifacts to Migrate field for a list of all artifacts changed for each IDT. Make sure you find all of the objects listed in the IDTs and select them to be pushed by highlighting them and clicking the green plus ‘+’ button to make the object appear in the lower box.

14. Promotion Master Duties
Click Next. You can enter a description if you like, but it is not mandatory. Click Next. You will be prompted to log-in with your credentials and once you click OK, the push from DEV to STAGING should begin.
Once changes have finished pushing to STAGING, go back to the promotion-current query and change the state of all the pushed IDTs to “Ready for QA”. This indicates that the changes are on Staging and the IDT is ready to be tested.
Send out another to the Integrity Developer Team stating that the changes are ready to be tested.
Now other members of the Integrity Developer Team will be testing those changes and this needs to be done before the cutoff deadline of 3:00pm Eastern for sending the final manifest to the Integrity Admin Team since they do the push from Staging to Production at the end of the day.
After testing of all the changes is complete on STAGING, the testers will set all of the IDTs’ state to “Ready for Deployment”. That indicates that they are ready to be pushed to Production. After testing is complete run the Admin Migration Wizard again, on STAGING this time, and get to the screen where you select admin objects to be promoted.

15. Promotion Master Duties
Once you have selected all of the objects to be migrated that day, click Print. That will display another window which has all of the artifacts you had selected for migration. Resize the columns so that all of the data is visible (especially for the object names). Click Print again and when the print window comes up, select a print service which will print the output to a PDF. For example, CutePDF is a free PDF writer service which works just fine if you do not have Adobe Acrobat Pro. Print the output to a PDF and give it a meaningful name such as “Promotion Manifest <Today’s Date>”.

16. Promotion Master Duties
With the new PDF manifest that you have created, open it and select all the text. Copy and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet (you may need to try a few times and Paste Special). Save the Excel spreadsheet with a name similar to the one you gave the PDF.
Send the PDF and Excel manifests to the Integrity Admin Team, along with a list of all the Change Requests which are being implemented as part of that day’s migration. List any Pre- or Post-Migration steps in that as well.
And you’re done!

17. Pros & Cons
Pros:
Easy to adapt to changing process needs (can include signoffs for certain actions).
Completely under the control of the admin team.
Allows for great auditing of migrations (can use the Query functionality that Integrity provides). Shows all changes requested, by who, and when the changes were actually implemented in Production. Can also send reports to management to show roadmap of success on projects from the development plan.
Replaced the previous MS Word doc sneakernet process of tracking migrations and making manual reports! Saved several hours per day just spent on tracking migration work.
Cons:
Needed some initial trial and error to find what worked best as a process.
Is really an elaborate workaround for functionality not found natively in Integrity (see RFCs , , , and ).