Zuora Platform - Application Lifecycle Management
Test, deploy, monitor, and manage Zuora with ease
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Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) refers to the way companies manage, track, and evolve their Zuora software application over time. Every company is constantly evolving as their business grows, and that means your Zuora use cases and configurations will change too. This may happen when you are:
- Expanding internationally
- Refreshing pricing and packaging
- Adding new offerings
- Streamlining business operations
- Adding new payment methods
- Acquiring or merging companies
- and much more
As long as your business is not staying static, then your Zuora application won’t either. That’s where Application Lifecycle Management comes in.
Zuora is typically managed by a system admin or a business applications team within a company. As these teams take on new business requirements, they are translated to Zuora in the form of configuration, connector, or API changes:
- Configuration Changes: Any configuration within Zuora, such as rate plans, payment methods, or UI changes.
- Connector Changes: Any configuration that manages the data sync to another 3rd party application.
- API Changes: Any API or SDK related to Zuora.
As changes are made, there are 4 categories within Application Lifecycle Management that these teams rely on:
- Testing and QA: The ability to easily test new capabilities and new use cases in Zuora
- Deployment Automation: The ability to easily deploy new configurations across environments
- Mass Updates: The ability to update and migrate bulk data across environments
- System Health & Monitoring: The ability to use APIs and SDKs to adapt Zuora for different users and use cases
1. Testing & QA
When it comes to testing strategy, companies need a series of defined tests to ensure that new releases do not negatively impact customers. Most companies have multiple stages of testing that require different sandboxes. Depending on the complexity of your business, you might have multiple environments to run different tests:
- Development Environment: Used by the developers to build new functionality and/or configuration changes
- QA environment: Used for e2e functional testing, integration testing, regression testing, performance testing
- UAT & Staging Environment: Used by release teams and end users; used to verify the release process and to ensure that roll-outs occur flawlessly
- Production Environment: The environment with live data for your users
Development Environment
Activities:
- Used by the developers to build new functionality and/or make changes
- Used by the developers to unit test the new functionality based on the acceptance criteria
Characteristics:
- Under control of the developers
- Not or minimally connected to the other environments
- Refreshed rarely
- The developers are free to change and push changes
QA Environment
Activities:
- Used for e2e functional testing/integration testing
- Used for regression testing
- Used for performance testing
Characteristics:
- Under control of the QA team
- Refreshed after each major release to ensure PROD configuration
- Production performance to ensure new functionality meets non-functional requirements
- Test data reflecting production for regression testing
UAT & Staging Environment
Activities:
- Used by Release team and End Users
- Verify Release process, ensure that roll-outs occur flawlessly
- Verify new release is fixing known production issues
- Used for new user or functionality training
Characteristics:
- Under control of the release manager
- Refreshed regularly to reflect production
Production Environment
Activities:
With each release:
- Smoke test & approval by operations team
- Smoke test & approval by end users
Characteristics:
- Under control of the Zuora platform owner
Testing becomes more critical as the pace of your business changes increase. We’ve seen this happen at companies with a rapid pace of innovation such as Absorb, where a testing strategy was critical for business growth.
Zuora has a range of Sandboxes that maps to these testing best practices. The 3 different sandboxes are:
- API Sandbox: Used for testing new capabilities
- Developer Sandbox: Used for integration development and testing (coming later this year)
- Central Sandbox: Used for UAT & performance testing
2. Deployment Automation
For companies with a rapid pace of new releases, some admins manage multiple changes to Zuora every single week. Deploying new configurations across environments takes time, and we recommend you take a more automated approach with the Deployment Manager and configuration templates.
Deployment Manager allows comparison and deployment of the configuration from one tenant to another. This includes setting such as:
- operational rules, such as bill run or journal run configurations
- pricing rules, such as currencies and rate plans
- custom objects and custom fields
- configurations like notifications, payment methods, and workflows
For example, if you create an updated version of a workflow in an API Sandbox, you can now deploy it directly into your other environments (Central Sandbox, Developer Sandbox, or Production) with just a few clicks.
Configuration templates in the Deployment Manager helps you move event faster, enabling you to jumpstart tenants by importing a templated metadata configuration file. You can save multiple configuration templates, and easily apply them to different environments through simple UI interface or APIs. This lets your team to use rinse and repeat configurations during the development and testing process.
3. Mass Updates
As you onboard new customers or run into situations where data migration is needed, your team may need tools to streamline mass updates. Developer Tools enable your admins and developers to:
- Performs mass price uplifts, add products, renewals, and suspensions on subscriptions.
- Create, update, or delete an object in Zuora on an enterprise scale.
- Minimizes effort to migrate or update complex product catalogs.
4. System Health and Monitoring
As a final step, your admins and business applications teams should always be monitoring your use of Zuora to find improvement opportunities and detect system issues. We recommend checking the System Health Dashboard to get a full view into the following:
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