How Does AnthillPro Help Me Automate Processes Throughout the Application Lifecycle?

AnthillPro can be used to automate Continuous Integration builds, nightly builds, automated tests, deployments, releases, or any other process in the application lifecycle.

Starting with the development stage, AnthillPro can automate Continuous Integration builds. AnthillPro can also automate the testing processes by automatically executing unit tests or functional tests on a particular build. And because AnthillPro has a distributed architecture, it can even automate stress tests by controlling any number of client machines used to exert a load on an application being tested.

AnthillPro can also automate the deployment process. You can learn much more about this in the deployment management writeup. In a nutshell, AnthillPro can manage deployments across multiple, different environments (such as DEV, QA, and PROD), each with different types of servers (such as DB, APP, and WEB) and different number of servers of each type. This allows a single deployment process to be defined that is smart enough to know how to deploy an application to the DEV environment with one server, the QA environment with three servers, and the PROD environment with ten servers.

AnthillPro can also automate the release process. This in practice turns out to be much easier said than done. The first difficulty is determining exactly what happens during the release process. This will be different based on the type of project. Projects that are deployable applications may treat the deployment as the release process. Projects that are library components may have a release process that creates a maintenance branch in the SCM system. Whatever the requirements of the release process, they can be implemented in AnthillPro using the embedded workflow engine.