Making release management faster for a Centre of Excellence

[asilarow]

Automation Use Case: Collating files for the automation release process, superfast

 

MVP Andrjez Silarow automates the release management process in a Centre of Excellence, allowing his team to release new projects faster than ever.

• Products Used: SS&C Blue Prism Cloud
• Target department: Automation Centre of Excellence
• Sector: Other

 

When release files get submitted for import into a higher environment, they need to be reviewed by the Release Management team before approval of the submission. This usually involved opening the file and manually traversing all the Processes, Objects, and related pages, ensuring it matches the release notes supplied and SDD.

This object allows automating that process, as it will read the release file from a network location, and provide a flattened table view of the contents in a Collection. This Collection in turn can be saved into an Excel file, or automatically traversed to verify the contents.

 

While managing the Centre of Excellence in my past roles, this used to be a bottleneck in a few bigger organisations.

There wasn't an easy way to solve this due to lack of expertise on the subject.

I knew the XML within the release files is standardised, and as such a good candidate for automation, so I went off to learn more about ways of interacting with XML programmatically.

I built the solution using VB.Net, and after a few trials and errors came up with code that would work every time. I ran this on several different release files, but as I couldn't use data from customer databases, or any production releases, this was done on my own content - as such comes with no warranty whatsoever, and may still have a few kinks here and there (due to lack of sufficient test cases).

The main challenge was to come up with code that would output a view usable not only manually but programmatically as well.

To overcome this I used various AI code analyzers, until I finally got the result I needed.

 

Cutting down the release management process from 3 hours per file to 15-30 minutes.

You can find the Object attached - but it is only an object providing the flattened data from the release file. It does not do any analysis, formatting, or restructuring as such. This is done on purpose to allow for more creative applications.

Happy modding!

 

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[Daniel_Sanhueza]

@asilarowawesome contribution! I'll definetly check that out 🙂

[sastharpa]

@asilarow Interesting, will sure check it out.