In an ideal world, every time a software build is promoted from one environment
to the next, the process would be completely automated, with complete auditing of
every step. For the most part, this is exactly a problem BuildMaster solves. In
some cases however, a manual deployment action is the only (or the easiest) option.
Whether it's physically flipping a switch, running a utility that requires a certain
user to respond to a message box prompt, or manually restarting a server; BuildMaster's
deployment plans will accommodate your process with the Manual Action.
Once you've created a deployment plan for your application, you can add the
Manual Action to your application's plan. As an example, I've filled
in the task information and assigned the action to someone in the Change Management
group:
Now, when a build is promoted, the build execution will halt once it reaches this
action. Any users in the "Change Management" group who have email addresses in the
system (or in LDAP if that's the directory provider being used) will receive an
email notification informing them that they must mark the manual action complete
before the execution can continue:
To mark the action complete, you can click the link in the email (assuming your
advanced configuration value BuildMaster_BaseUrl is setup correctly), or from within
BuildMaster:
Clicking any of the above links displays the tasks that you must mark complete:
The user who clicks the "Mark Complete" button will be noted in the execution log
of the build:
