Release process for CMS Code

System

In most of my customer implementations I have seen customers buying TeamSite Dev and Prod server and they develop code on Dev server and move to Prod after it is tested and ready for production use. On Production server, they might do some UAT before finally releasing the code to users.

I have a customer who have very strict release processes for code development and the release management is not ready to negotiate on release processes for CMS code. All their code needs to go from Dev->Integrated Dev->QA->Staging/UAT->Production and that’s what they want for CMS code. I have suggested them to do Dev, Integ Dev and QA on the Dev server and UAT and Prod on the Prod server since they would not like to have less than 5 stages where the code can be in the release cycle.

We are maintaining CMS code in a separate branch within Dev server for version control and we deploy it to iw-home to test it and ofcourse templates are in respective branches. The only way I know for testing CMS code for mimicking multiple environments on one CMS server is to rename files and have one version each for Dev, Integ Dev, QA etc. We can have different workareas or branches for Dev, Integ Dev or QA but to test the code, it needs to be deployed to iw-home. For example, if my developers are working on xyz.wft, they have to deploy it to iw-home as xyz_developer1.wft, xyz_integdev.wft etc. to make sure that they don’t affect other users or what QA is working on and then modify available_templates.cfg to have all different versions of this workflow.

I think their release management is making it overly complex and the developers will feel overwhelmed by these file renaming and it’s a error prone process.

Any experiences here.. does anyone of you have to manage CMS code at different levels in the release process at the same time and have any success stories you can share? Does anyone of you have to store CMS code in any other version control tool and then move the code to teamsite server to test?

Thanks,
-Anurag