Does parent-child step relation make sense outwith rolling deployments?

Hi,

I’m revisiting an old but still often-used Octopus deployment process to make some changes.

We deploy to 3 environments, ‘Internal Test’, ‘External Test’, ‘Live’.
On each of those environments, we have one web server and one database server, so we don’t really have ‘rolling’ deployments.

Our database deployment includes a few different steps (deploy database migration package, run migration, run some other scripts).

It would make logical sense for us to have a ‘parent’ task ‘Perform Database Deployment’ containing the above 3 child steps.

My question is - would this be correct, even although we don’t have the notion of ‘rolling’ deployments? Would this be the best way of tidying up our steps?

Thanks,

Artie

Hi Artie,

Thanks for getting in touch!

While you are correct that parent-child steps were created for rolling deployments the scenario that you are looking at using them for (logical grouping) is perfectly valid and will work correctly.

Let me know if there is anything else you need.

Regards,
Alex

Hi Alex,

That’s great, thanks for confirming we wouldn’t be wrongly using parent-child steps by grouping steps in this way.

Now you’ve confirmed this, we realise we can tidy up our entire set of deployment steps by doing similar groupings. Another question has arisen though - is there functionality to ‘collapse’ each of the parent steps, so that rather than seeing Scenario A below, we instead see Scenario B, but with the option to expand/collapse each parent step?

Thanks again,

Artie

Scenario A

1
1.1
1.2
1.3
2
2.1
2.2
3
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4

Scenario B

1
2
3

Hi Artie,

Thanks for the feedback on that one. I’ve passed it through to our usability team to get some feedback as it seems like that would be quite useful (not sure on implementation difficulty however :slight_smile:).

I’ll let you know the outcome of our discussions.

Regards,
Alex

Hi Alex,

Thanks for acknowledging my expand/collapse feedback.

If they’re not already aware, the usability team may want to have a look at the “Task Log” section for a Release. This is really well implemented and allows expand/collapse at various different levels, and makes it really easy for us to see particular parts of the log.

That’s the kind of usability that would make the list of Process steps much easier to read.

Cheers

Artie

Hi Artie,

Thanks for that!

I’ve spoken with the team and while they agree that it would be a nice improvement, for the moment they have a lot of tasks on their plate so can’t immediately add it to their workload. For now they have requested that you raise a UserVoice for the change so that we can get some more feedback from the community (as well as gauge how much interest there is in the feature).

Please let me know if there is anything else that I can help you with,

Regards,
Alex

Hi Alex,

Thanks for letting me know.

Turns out there’s an existing UserVoice request, so I’ve upvoted that.

Cheers

Artie