Lifecycle Runs capability
You use lifecycles to organize the work of DevOps teams during the highly iterative application release process. This means that during the course of a release in pre-production environments, it is quite possible that deployments are required or occur multiple times for applications and components before the suite of items for the release is promoted to the next environment. In order to avoid redundancy in the request work, BMC Release Process Management introduces the concept of Runs. A Run is simply a group of requests in a lifecycle stage. You can clone a run like a template. Thus, even though requests may have been run in various states during the stage, the definitive work to do the deployment can be gathered into a run and promoted to the next lifecycle stage.
The following points summarize the Lifecycle Run concept:
- Runs are seen under Lifecycle > Stages section. You must create runs before you can see them. See Creating-and-executing-a-lifecycle-run.
- Runs are the ordered execution of requests which have been selected from a lifecycle stage
- Runs allow you to assemble requests from different applications and target different environments into a executable flow.
To use lifecycle run capability, you need to create Requests (see Managing-lifecycles). You must create multiple requests.
The following is a basic use case in terms of lifecycle runs in the context of BMC Release Process Management:
- Release Coordinator (RC) is on Lifecycles > Stage page.
- RC selects requests from a single stage.
- RC clicks create run (cannot click unless you select at least one request)
- Selected requests can be in any state
- Planned and created requests not included in any other run – will be assigned to run directly
- Any other state or already included in a run will be cloned
- RC gets facebox with Run details.
- RC enters run details (required: name).
- RC clicks Create run.
- System takes user to the run stage.
- RC can reorder requests in run – serial and parallel.
- RC can remove requests from run or RC can add requests to a run.
- RC can also plan, start, hold, or cancel a run.
- System can automatically put run in problem or complete status based on child request status.
- Run is complete.
The states of run available in BMC Release Process management are as follows:
- Created
- Planned
- Started
- Hold
- Blocked
- Completed
A deleted run is not displayed in BMC Release Process Management.
A better solution can be achieved by selecting multiple requests from various application/environments to get a suitable plan. Also you are able to clone requests from another RUN to make available exact requirement-request to be defined for another solution for the same or later release.
Related Topics
Where to go from here
To learn about the steps for lifecycle runs, see Creating-and-executing-a-lifecycle-run.