Power CAT Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

The Automation Kit leverages the ALM Accelerator to provide ALM functionality for solutions that include Power Automate Desktop

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GitHub Deployment Process

Similar to the release process used for other Power CAT managed kits the Automation Kit for Power Platform uses the ALM Accelerator to deploy releases to our public GitHub releases.

Our internal process has a Power Platform environment for Development, Test and Production. Once we are ready for a release our integrated GitHub Actions package the managed and unmanaged deployment solutions along with release notes automatically for a GitHub Draft release.

Once the draft release is ready we can publish new versions or hotfixes as needed.

What this means for you

Now that we have this automation in place the automated ALM release has the following benefits for you:

Visibility into all the low code source code that makes up the Automation Kit so that you can investigate how we have built the kit.
Streamlined automation process that can respond to bugs or issues quickly and provide hotfixes if needed.
Automated compilation of all Bugs and Features that are included in a release.
We include Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse and Power Automate Desktop as part of our ALM process for our Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment.

Roadmap

You can investigate our open ALM related backlog items in our GitHub Issues Register

Overall we build on the existing out of the box Power Platform and Microsoft DevOps product features together ALM Accelerator. This combination allows us to focus on specific extensions that help with hyperautomtion.

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Power CAT Automation Kit Release Checker

The following outlines key steps in the Automation Kit release process:

Changes made in our Power Platform Dev environment are saved to a branch in the public GitHub repository
When changes are ready for inclusion into a test release they are merged into the main branch using a Pull Request. Before the Pull Request can be completed, the Azure DevOps validation pipeline needs to successfully complete and the Pull Request reviewed.
Once the Pull Request has passed the automated checks and received review approval it can be merged into the main branch. This merge triggers the test Azure DevOps build pipeline which publishes the managed build to the test Power Platform environment.
After internal testing the Azure DevOps production pipeline is manually triggered to generate a Production Power Platform deployment.
Once the is ready a release, the release Azure DevOps pipeline creates a draft release including release notes and build assets. The final release build will close all open issues and close the milestone. Published build tag the GitHub repository with a Month and year label applied.