Our experience with Botron Software Configuration Manager

Since it’s Holiday Season we wanted to offer you our own little “gift”. It’s something we came across recently while trying to solve a pressing issue. It’s a Jira add-on by the name of Botron Software Configuration Manager (http://www.botronsoft.com/products/configuration-manager/)  and it saved us a lot of headaches. Before we tell you more about it, let’s see how it got on our radar.

The context

One of our banking sector clients, asked us to help them with a solution which implied the upgrade of JIRA.  We had to upgrade from JIRA 313 to JIRA 7010 while going through all four intermediary versions.  All this, while the three environments (DEV, QA and PROD) had to stay synchronized.  

Needless to say, this task was labeled as mission critical by the client.

The problem

The main challenge was not losing data along the migration and maintaining the client’s current workflows. While you might say that this is something typical in the day-to-day activity of a software testing company, it’s also where the problems started showing up.

By default, Jira does not come with a built-in configuration porting mechanism from one environment to another. This means we have to rely on an JIRA add-on. Yet add-ons sometimes come with bugs and/or compatibility issues of their own. We got a first-hand taste of this when, with only three weeks left before the project deadline, we noticed that part of the data we tried to migrate became corrupt. Also, something was blocking the synchronization of environments. While we managed to fix part of the problems the main issue remained: customer IDs were not in synch.

The road to the solution

From what we could tell, the problem pointed to configuration management actions – the JIRA add-ons we used were not working as expected. Quite a predicament – it seemed that the add-ons were both the problem and the solution at the same time.  

We had to look for a new add-on which would offer us a good analysis of all the changes we were about to make during configuration deployments. Also, it had to shows how they would impact the existing configuration.

After some research, we came across Botron’s Configuration Manager Plugin (http://www.botronsoft.com/products/configuration-manager/ ). Simply put, it enables automated deployment of configurations across JIRA instances. It also allowed us to take system configuration snapshots: basically the whole configuration of the JIRA instance (projects, workflows, and custom fields). These could then be used to merge the configuration of one JIRA instance to another.

This may come as a surprise, but it was the only tool in the market capable of doing this the right way.

Long story short, it fixed our synchronization issues. We successfully migrated all relevant elements from user IDs to validations and other functions.

Last but not least, it also comes with a friendly user interface and a reliable (and fast) team behind it.

All in all, it’s a time saver.