Overview

With the industry moving towards DevOps, the adoption of a pipeline-based development methodology is the key. A pipeline provides a set of stages (tasks/activities) defined in a sequential order that essentially serves as a means for code promotions from the version control tool to the production deployment.

Often, there needs to be a verification/validation gate, an activity involved in these pipelines is to gatekeep what was completed in the previous stage before moving to the next stage. These gates ideally should be acting as a point of verification with all the required information for the stakeholder to be able to decide whether to proceed to the next stage or terminate the pipeline. It wouldn't be wrong to call these gates as control points for the software delivery.

Usually, these gates are the verification step between two stages of the pipeline. Hence there could be multiple gates in a single pipeline. At each gate, the stakeholder assesses the information of the previous stages and either stops the pipeline or proceeds to the next stage. The time taken by the stakeholder to reject/approve is directly proportional to the amount of information to be collected & verified. If it is a production deployment then the verification time within which the stakeholder should decide is much more critical.

ISD introduced the Visibility feature which allows you to provide information for decision approval gates. With this feature, the user can make an informed decision regarding the pipeline execution, as to whether the pipeline would proceed to the next stage or will terminate. In order to be able to take the right decision, the user would be provided with all the information that is required from all / any of the previous stages.

The visibility feature fetches all the information you need in a consolidated view to enable the user to make the right decision. You need to initially configure all the data sources from which ISD is supposed to fetch the data.

The next step would be to then connect the services of the application to these connectors. Next, we will learn how to configure and set up visibility for different connector tools. ISD supports the following data sources:

• Artifactory

• Bitbucket

• Bitbucket Server

• GitHub

• Bamboo

• Jenkins

• Jira

• ServiceNow

• Aqua Wave

• HCL AppScan​

• JFrog XRay Scanning

• Prisma Cloud

• SonarQube

• Autopilot