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/or 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). Further details on this process are here: Obfuscating Volunteer PII
Start up a ClinSpark instance with an appropriate deployment
Update the system configurations 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 to the IQ. This report shows all application configuration and settings.
This process is coordinated via service desk tickets. When complete, the engineering team will provide a copy of the IQ and/or ECR document in the ticket, as well as information pertaining to system configuration state when appropriate.
Limitations
Validation environments are expected to be closed two weeks following a successful PROD upgrade.
It is expected that a fresh VAL environment is made from PROD for every release of ClinSpark. Maintaining a persistent instance of VAL and upgrading that instance skips a key step of the qualification process, which is a ‘dry run’ of the actual upgrade. During this process, realistic run times can be observed, which supports planning and scheduling and roll-back decision points.