Case Study: Sandbox Management
Business Situation:
A major Technology firm needed help post integration phase to create a Sandbox management process. Their current process had Development, QA and UAT sandbox all rolled into one. This was working one way to their advantage as they had fewer sandboxes which meant lesser maintenance, shorter deployment time porting code and configurations to PRODUCTION. But there was risk involved for the development and business as there was no dedicated UAT environment and Sandbox and PROD was not operational in sync which caused failures and delays during deployment.
Technical Situation:
Single sandbox was a huge bottleneck for development as all the development and testing activities were stalled during UAT sessions so that business aren’t hindered with changes in the code/configuration while they were testing. So the single sandbox was shared with the development team and the business which carried huge risk as these environments were not operating in sync.
Openmind Solution:
Openmind Team reviewed the current system and design. Openmind proposed a solution and created a new sandbox specially for the business users for UAT purposes. We designed the same by creating a replica copy of PRODUCTION to be refreshed before every UAT session. Developers and testers had no access to this new environment. We only gave the access to system administrators and business to work on this new environment. This meant the code/configurations need to be ported to UAT sandbox first before finally moving to PRODUCTION.
Business Benefits:
The new sandbox our team created resulted in a more streamlined deployment process. This resulted that the clients team was able to identify the deployment failures early on at the staging (UAT) environment leaving less room for failures while deploying on PROD. Business users could now test the features on exact production data rather than test data prior to actual Go-Live. The new UAT sandbox set stage to be a stable environment which was then used to troubleshoot production issues.