Going from a JIRA Release flow to Bamboo deployment project

[Olivier Vandevoorde]

I'm investigating the possibilites of deployment projects in Bamboo 5, and would like to know if it's a good idea to change the way we work today.

This is how it goes today :

We use Bamboo and JIRA to support the build and deployment proces of our applications.

In Bamboo there is a CI (continuous integration) build plan which compiles and run tests on the new source commits in subversion. Once the developer has finished he can build a release by running a Release plan. It's a parameterized plan where he can enter the version number to build and the new development version number. After the Release plan has run, artifacts (an ear and a config archive) are uploaded to the Nexus repositiory.

To deploy a release version on our test, acceptance our production environment, the developer has to create a "Release" issue in JIRA, specifying the version number and when (datetime) the new version has to deployed to one of the environments.

The JIRA Release workflow = Open -> built -> promote to TST -> available in TST -> promote to ACC -> .... -> available in PRD -> Closed

Once it's in status "promote to ...", an automated deployscript picks it up, deploys the application on the server, and changes the status to "available in ...", specifying the effective deployment date(time). The deployscript only runs on a scheduled basis 3 times a day, outside office hours (morning, noon and evening).

My question is : should and can we replace the JIRA Release issue proces with a Bamboo deployment project?

[Yannis Despotopoulos]

Deployment Projects cannot be cloned (yet), or invoked by multiple Build Plans.

So if your "deployscript" is used by multiple plans, I would not recommend the deployment project.

(please also check https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/192930/can-i-reuse-deployment-environments-between-plans )