Azure DevOps Cutover integration and Snippets

Hi, and welcome back to the Cutover Training series. In this video, we will explore how integrating as your DevOps into the Cutover Collaborative Automation Platform offers you incredible flexibility. Create work items to report bugs on the fly and give stakeholders complete visibility through live updates, or right from within Cutover. In this example, dynamic runbook, we use our powerful snippets feature to boost efficiency and look at how automation can streamline your testing and validation process. Let's get started. Here we have a new code release that is being deployed into production. The dynamic runbook begins with some prep activities and automated comms before testing begins. I will start the runbook by clicking the play icon in the top right hand corner of screen. Once the pre deployment tasks are complete, comms are automatically sent out to all stakeholders via one of our many communications tasks. For this runbook, we are using our MS teams integration. To learn more, see our MS teams integration video. Adding the Azure DevOps integration task to your run book is simple. Create a new task and click on it to open the task details panel. Here, we can see that the task type is currently set to normal task. Let me change that. We can scroll down until we reach the integration tasks. I will select as your DevOps. Opening the custom integration menu reveals a new set of parameters for this task. We'll look at this in more detail later. Alright. Let's jump ahead a bit. Snippets are pre made groups of tasks that can be added to your dynamic run book as and when they are needed. This is perfect for the testing and validation phase. Here we have the first of our snippet tasks, start smoke test. Starting the task opens the snippet window. I will choose smoke test and continue. You can see the snippet has been added and is ready to begin. No. Tasks added from a snippet have this puzzle piece icon next to them so they are easily identified. Tasks can be manually started or automatically triggered once the prior task has ended or triggered externally. We are now ready to begin testing. It looks like the automated test validation has passed with no errors. However, during the manual code check, we discovered a critical problem I now need to report this bargain as your DevOps ASAP. I will mark this validation as a fail and add a description. A really nice feature of snippets is you can include another snippet task within, as you can see here with the bug identified snippet. I'll select it and continue. Okay. The newly added snippet begins with our Azure DevOps integration. Which will automatically create a new work item for me. Clicking on the Azure DevOps task opens the details panel on the right hand side of the screen. Let's add some detail to this. First, I'll add a bug title. Let's call it co check bug critical. I can assign the bug by adding an email address. Next, I will add a description for the bug report. And finally, I can select the priority level as one. Don't forget to press save once all the fields are filled in. So that we can see how as your DevOps integrates with Cutover in real time, I have brought up a zero on the right hand side of the screen and I have cut over on the left. Okay. Let me run the task. Once the task is connected, it will start running. There we go. The work item has been created in Azure DevOps, and now you can see back in cut over the task details have been updated. We see the work item ID and the current status showing. We can also see them as labels above the task in the task list. It is important to note that for those stakeholders who do not have access to Azure DevOps, they still gain visibility via these status updates, directly within cut over. Pretty cool. Right? Okay. Once the bug is fixed, we can update the status details of the work item in as your dev ops. Let me make some amendments. In the description, I'll add bug identified and resolved. And I'll change the status to resolved. As soon as I press save and Azure, those changes will be reflected in cutover. You can see the task details have been updated. Again, this gives full transparency for those stakeholders who only have access to this run book and not as your dev ops. Okay. Another very useful feature of this integration is to notice how the task is still currently in a running state. Back in as your dev ops, once we are sure there is nothing more to do with this work item, I can change its status to closed. Pressing save automates the end of the task back in cutover. This means the upcoming validation is now startable. Depending on whether the retest passes or fails the validation, we have the option of adding the bug identified snippet again to repeat the process. Otherwise, we can simply continue on with this dynamic new code deployment runbook. You can see how this level of automation offers incredible ability and efficiency through integrating your Azure DevOps infrastructure with cut over's powerful collaborative automation platform. For more information about using our range of integrations, please speak to your customer success manager. Thank you for watching Cutover Training.