Thalia environments and workflow

The thalia working environment is split into four parts:

• Development - a shared ennvironment for developers to deploy and test new code. Our CI system will build the code from SCM every night and deploy the binary the development server if the build and smoke test are successful.

• Testing -  used by QA testers and CAT users. The code on the test server is more stable than that on the development server. During the two week QA process, we will release a new build to QA every three days or whenever important bug(s) are fixed. A release note will be sent to QA along with the new release containing a list of issues resolved in this release.We will give our final release candidate to QA three business days before the actual release date. Currently, we are releasing on Monday night every 4 weeks. 

• Production - live service.  The production servers have their own sets of passwords to protect the production environment: the tomcat manager password on thalia5 and 8, the alfresco admin user's password and regular user's password. Only root instances are allowed in .k5login files.

We don't have a staging environment at this time. Staging is a stable release containing test data for other services to test against.

Nightly builds and smoke tests run on isda-build1.mit.edu .