December 9th, 2021 by Adam Sandman
During a recent demonstration of the SpiraPlan integration with Microsoft Azure DevOps (ADO) we had a customer ask us if the integration between SpiraPlan and Azure DevOps Pipelines for continuous integration and continuous deployment worked for both the development build pipelines and the release deployment pipelines. This blog explains the difference and demonstrates how SpiraPlan can integrate with both kinds.
Azure DevOps Pipelines
Inside Microsoft ADO you can see the list of development build pipelines by going to the main Pipelines menu and viewing the list of configured Pipelines. Each of these can be easily integrated with SpiraTeam or SpiraPlan as described in our Azure DevOpe Pipelines Integration Guide.
Basically, you install the SpiraPlan ADO marketplace add-on and then simply add the special Spira task to your pipeline YAML file to configure which Spira product and release the build will be reported against:
Note that the configuration maps the following variables to the build:
- Build Number: $(Build.BuildNumber)
- Build ID: $(Build.BuildId)
Now, the question from our prospect was whether this integration was also available with Microsoft Azure DevOps release pipelines. Unlike the ones above, these are not for building the code and integrating ready for testing, these are the deployment actions used to deploy the final system into staging or production.
Azure DevOps Release Pipelines
The steps to configure the ADO release pipelines to integrate with Spira is similar to the approach for build pipelines. You can simply click on the Edit button for the release pipeline in ADO:
Then make sure to add the Export data to Spira task from the ADO marketplace add-on. You will need to specify the ID of the SpiraPlan product and release and also adjust the variables being used to send the data to Spira. You will want to change the Build Name and Build ID to use:
- Build Name: $(Release.ReleaseName)
- Build ID: $(Release.RelaseId)
Once that is done, you can execute the release pipeline as normal. The results of both the build pipeline and the release deployment pipeline will now be recorded in SpiraPlan:
So now you can use SpiraPlan to monitor and track both continuous integration pipeline events and continuous deployment release events.