How do other customers 'add a new development environment?'

[iainb]

Hi,

Lets say you have 3 environments

DEV > TEST > PROD

They are used as expected. Development is done in DEV, it gets moved to TEST for testing then it is promoted to PROD.

Once the changes are in PROD they get cloned back to DEV and TEST.

The environments are in sync and all is good.

Let say you want to add a new development environment called DEV2.

After the environment has been provisioned by ServiceNow. What are the next steps to make it a 'development environment'?

I think I know the best way to do this but I'm interested in how others do it or if there is a best practice.

Thanks,

Iain

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @iainb 

Logically, it's not recommended to clone Dev to Dev2, as Prod is the stable environment. However, if you believe that cloning Dev to Dev2 is better, time-saving, and helps with synchronization, then you can proceed with that approach."

[Ankur Bawiskar]

@iainb

It depends on your instance model.

Usually customers use DEV, TEST, PROD or DEV, TEST, UAT, PROD

You can clone PROD -> DEV2 and then continue the development.

you can also use team development (plugin) which will allow developers to develop in their own instances and then can allow them to be code reviewed and pulled into the main DEV instance/merged there.

Team Development 

If my response helped please mark it correct and close the thread so that it benefits future readers.

[iainb]

Our instance model is more like

DEV > TEST > PROD 

being the main ones but we also have 

DEV2

DEV3

DEV4

DEV5

DEV6

which all have their own projects on going. It does all eventually end up in UAT then PROD.

The problem being faced is developers are mentioning that DEV 2/3/4 etc are missing things that the original DEV has.

I believe a clone from PROD to a fresh instance is the root cause of this issue due to missing preservers.

We looked at team development in the past but it was not suitable.

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @iainb 

The problem being faced is developers are mentioning that DEV 2/3/4 etc are missing things that the original DEV has.

This will be the case because all environments are used for different developments. You can either use a GitHub-like solution for merging, or use Dev5 as the merger environment where changes from all environments will be gathered, merged, and executed.

[iainb]

I believe it is more simple that that. 

For example take an out of the box table that is preserved. 

Credentials [Discovery_credential]

This table has data in DEV. 

Let say we clone PROD to DEV2.

Does DEV2 still contain the credentials from DEV?

It does not because the data in the new instance is preserved (which is no data)

This is just an example of a single table. The same thing will be happening in hundreds of tables.

The development differences are not the issue. The initial clone from Prod to a clean (zBooted) instance is the issue.

Our original DEV instance is over 10 years old. Manually aligning the old and new DEV would be difficult.