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Today I’d like to show you how you can use the Nolio Automation Center in your QA lab to make your deployment easier and perform your tests faster.

When I joined Nolio a few months ago (I can’t believe it’s been 9 months already!) Eran, our CEO, showed me a brief demo of the Nolio Automation Center. He talked about the way the application can automate anything IT does on a regular basis, from deployment, through daily installment, to disaster recovery, and the list goes on and on.

I completely understood what he meant by saying how it can make the IT guy’s life much easier, but I was also thinking, “What about the people over at QA?  They also need to do the same things!”

As you know, in QA, you get a new build from R&D on a regular basis (once a week, every other week, etc), and then you need to have some people spend a day or two (if everything goes well) installing and deploying it on the various architecture and operating systems.

We all know the feeling we get when R&D hands us the build at the end of the week, just when we want to go home… instead, we need to start uninstalling the servers, cleaning the database and re-installing the new build – when all we want to do is start the weekend!

As if this is not enough, after you have everything done, you need to run some tests on everything (from sanity to regressions) and only when this is over (if a new build didn’t show up already), you can actually do your work and test the new features, bug fixes etc.

Sounds familiar? Touching soft spots? Well, the Nolio Automation Center can really help reduce the time it takes QA to do all the things I’ve mentioned, and free up some extra time to finish the tasks they have planned (but, instead, had to fight the problems in the new build). If you put minimal effort into becoming familiar with the Nolio Automation Center, its useful actions and how it works, you can reduce this time from a few days to much (MUCH!) less.

What you need to do is design the process you want the Nolio server to perform on your machines (this process imitates the exact steps you do every time, so no extra thinking is needed), creating it using the really-easy-to-use building blocks related UI, and let our agents do the rest. It really is that simple.

Think of the next time you get a new build and all you have to do is run these 2 processes that you have already created:

1. “Clean Machines” process – the process that will prepare your machines for the new build.

2. “Install New Build’ process – the process that will deploy the given build on your server.

When these processes are finished, you will have more time to do the things you planned to do, and you will not have to explain to your team leader why half of your week was dedicated to installation and deployment.

Post written by Uri Scheiner.

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Nolio Application Service Automation is a software platform for designing and executing automated application service workflows across the data center, enabling reliable, effective processes for the management of application change.