Loupe and Inedo BuildMaster integration now available to support DevOps Teams

Inedo and Gibraltar Software have worked together for years to help define and refine a complete vision for DevOps in the Enterprise but this is the first time we’ve had an opportunity to directly integrate our server products together. The key things we knew we wanted to automate were:

• Feeding Build & Release Information to Loupe: Loupe Resolve tracks runtime errors and scores them based on what version they happened in and how far the version was promoted. An error in the field in a release version is more important than one just on a developer’s desk. BuildMaster knows exactly what versions have been built and how far they’ve been promoted.

• Integrating Runtime Error Reporting with BuildMaster: BuildMaster automatically creates release notes based on information in external defect tracking systems, so it was a natural to integrate that with Loupe Resolve’s error management to make sure as runtime problems are fixed that is reflected in the release notes as well.

Automatic Version, Release Type, and Promotion Level Management

Loupe leverages application version and release type information to optimize how runtime errors are displayed and reported. For example, Loupe Alerts can be configured to only respond if an error appears in a Release version, not a Beta version. This integration is based around semantic versioning and a configurable release type hierarchy.

When correctly configured, you get useful summary dashboards in Loupe like this:

In this example you can see that Loupe knows the current and previous release versions and that there is a newer version that’s in Beta. Knowing this it can intelligently prioritize issues and show whether promoting that newest version is a good idea or not.

It’s tedious to go into Loupe and enter version information by hand when new versions are published. Sure, Loupe automatically adds new versions when it sees them but without anything else to go on it assumes they’re just internal development builds.
Since BuildMaster knows exactly what it has built and what’s promoted to which environments it can provide this information across to Loupe.

Centralize All Release Defects & Errors

Inedo BuildMaster can automatically generate release notes between versions by integrating with your work item tracking system to gather defect information associated with each version. But, what about runtime errors tracked only by Loupe? Many teams choose to leave those just in Loupe and not open defects for them to differentiate runtime errors and development defects. If your team works this way, BuildMaster can retrieve Issue details from Loupe and integrate them with the information provided by your other systems into a common view of the problems in any version and what’s been addressed in each version.

From Loupe

Into BuildMaster

Getting Started with BuildMaster and Loupe

To enable integration between Loupe and BuildMaster, just install the Loupe Extension from within BuildMaster and follow the instructions that get installed. Once it’s installed you can browse the Documentation page under the User Icon for more information. To start your own trial of Loupe, just go to the Loupe Trial Signup. If you’re a Loupe customer and want to try out BuildMaster, go to Download BuildMaster.

If you’d like to preview the instructions before installing, you can check out the wiki for the extension on GitHub.

Going Beyond Stock Integration

Like each of the extensions developed by Inedo for BuildMaster, the Loupe Extension is Open Source on GitHub. You can download the source, easily build it and modify it yourself to handle scenarios we didn’t think about out of the box. Don’t hesitate to send in feedback on the extension either - if you’re running into something, chances are other folks are too!