Xebialabs Servicenow Bring Together the Worlds of Continuous Delivery and Itsm

Last Updated May 07, 2019 — DevOps Expert

DevOps

As word of DevOps success among individual teams starts to spread across the enterprise, it's only natural that more teams will want to get their apps on board. But there's another natural byproduct of an enterprise-sized DevOps transformation––a proliferation of multiple, varying, interdependent tools, teams, processes, and releases.

While Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is largely responsible for enabling many of the benefits of DevOps, IT Service Management (ITSM) processes are often neglected in enterprise CI/CD adoptions. The disconnect between CI/CD and ITSM in an environment where many different functional teams are using a variety of tools makes tracking feature updates, user stories, and IT service requests a nightmare. XebiaLabs' integration with ServiceNow provides the industry's first bridge between CI/CD and ITSM. By integrating with ServiceNow, the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform helps you connect the features and user stories that the development team manages in a backlog management tool like JIRA to the change tickets that come in via an ITSM system like ServiceNow. In this demo, Ravan Naidoo, Director of Innovation at XebiaLabs, shows you how to connect XebiaLabs with ServiceNow to deliver better software faster and with less risk. The demo is part of our recent webinar––Avoid Troubled Waters: Building a Bridge Between ServiceNow and CI/CD. The demo starts at the 15:15 mark.

How it Works

To execute a software release, a variety of tasks have to happen in the delivery pipeline, from Planning to Production. Taking a manual approach to execute these tasks, one that varies from team to team, is highly inefficient and does not provide the standardization and controls organizations need. In order to scale release processes across a diverse set of teams and tools, enterprises need end-to-end visibility and data synchronization that spans the entire pipeline. With XebiaLabs, all of the building blocks that make up a software delivery ecosystem are available and visible in one template. You get a birds'-eye view of what's happening across the entire pipeline––instant visibility into all features and their attached stories, plus integrated service ticketing and automated governance. The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform lets you create standard, repeatable templates for all releases in the pipeline. As a release progresses through the pipeline, incidents and change requests can be automatically updated based on real-time activities that happen during the software release process. When the release hits the Test environment, for instance, the ITSM tasks defined by the integration with ServiceNow start automatically.

Bringing Together Development & Change Management

The gap between CI/CD and ITSM is often a result of a disconnect between the IT and business stakeholders within an organization––developers are only interested in their code, product owners in their business releases, and operations teams in availability and stability. A real world software release involves a lot more than developers writing code. Things like acceptance criteria, validation, traceability, and ITSM processes need to happen in a way that contributes to quality but doesn't hinder speed. The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform connects these processes to the CI/CD pipeline so that developers can seamlessly move their code through the pipeline knowing that all the appropriate controls are in place. Developers can check their code into the main feature branch and move on without having to worry about things like making a manual update to the CMDB. Once the developer makes their commit, the pipeline takes over the heavy lifting, automatically integrating the various activities that are defined and categorized in the template, scanning for code analysis, and, as the release gets closer to Production, automatically creating change requests. A change manager doesn't need to leave the tool they're using to see a change request generated by ServiceNow. The change manager can drill into the ticket from the XebiaLabs interface and get instant access to the information they need, a process that was previously done with an email or phone call. A change manager doesn't need to leave the tool they're using to see a change request generated by ServiceNow. The change manager can drill into the ticket from the XebiaLabs interface and get instant access to the information they need, a process that was previously done with an email or phone call. Now, with one click, change managers can see ServiceNow directly in the CI/CD pipeline, access the ServiceNow dashboards to evaluate release risks, and avoid the mundane job of manually updating the CMDB.

Try it Out

By connecting ITSM with CI/CD pipelines, the real-time status of features, issues, and service requests across all teams and tools in the ecosystem can be automatically tracked and visible, enabling software delivery to happen at top speed, while ensuring audit requirements are met and compliance reports are generated. See for yourself and try XebiaLabs for free today.

Learn more:

• Connect CI/CD and ITSM
• How to Build a Bridge Between CI/CD & ServiceNow in the Enterprise
• Change Management in the Age of DevOps Automation

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Source: https://digital.ai/catalyst-blog/demo-how-to-connect-your-cicd-pipeline-to-servicenow

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