Summary
The following instructions detail at an appropriate abstraction how certain qualified (IQ’d) environments are created. These instructions are shared to assist customer validation teams in interpreting the IQ and ECR documents provided.
VAL Environment Creation
VAL environments are temporary environments. Except for the initial onboarding process, they are always created by cloning current PROD instances and obfuscating volunteer data. These steps are followed by our engineering support team:
Copy the appropriate PROD Main or Test database into a new database schema for the respective VAL instance.
Run an obfuscation process to scrub volunteer Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
Start up a ClinSpark instance with an appropriate deployment
Update the configuration to reflect the new environment name and appropriate configurations for the functionality being tested
Capture the startup output of the ClinSpark Tomcat process. This output shows the key environment properties such as JVM version, Tomcat version and relevant environment variables.
Export the PDF configuration report from the environment, and attach this to the IQ. This report shows all application configuration and settings.
Limitations
It is critical that a fresh VAL environment is made from PROD for every release of ClinSpark. Maintaining a persistent instance of VAL and upgrading it skips a key step of the qualification process, which is essentially a ‘dry run’ of the actual upgrade where realistic run times can be observed, which supports planning and scheduling and roll-back decision points.
Validation environments will be closed within two weeks of a PROD upgrade.