Better lifecycle management through watsonx Assistant’s multiple environments
Enterprise users of IBM watsonx Assistant have the option to add up to three test environments, strengthening their development pipeline
*Watson Assistant has been rebranded to watsonx Assistant. Any reference to it in this article refers to its new name.
The Publish model
Watson Assistant’s lifecycle isn’t a straight line, it’s a three-part loop:
- Build — creating your assistant’s actions and refining them with your team
- Deploy — configuring your assistant’s connections and publishing it to a channel
- Improve — using your analytics to discover where your assistant has room to grow
One of the principal challenges of lifecycle management is continuously enhancing your assistant behind the scenes while keeping a version of it deployed on a live channel. To address this challenge, the new Watson Assistant experience provides several tools aimed at streamlining version control:
- Publish — the function that creates a version of your content, allowing you to promote it to an environment
- Environments — the areas where in-progress and published versions of your content live
- Switch and Revert — the functions that let you change which version lives in a given environment
The new Watson Assistant comes equipped with two environments, Draft and Live. Assistant builders write content in the Draft environment, then publish that content as a Version, allowing them to either promote that version to the Live environment or save it in the version bank.
Builders can also publish a newer version to the Live environment with the Switch versions option, and they can pull a published version back into the Draft environment with the Revert option.
This structure lets teams keep the build timeline and the test-deploy cycle independent, ensuring a smooth, continuous lifecycle loop. That said, the size and complexity of teams managing digital assistants for large enterprises usually requires testing and reviewing beyond what the two-environment structure allows.
That’s why IBM has added the option to add multiple environments. This feature is available for Enterprise instances of Watson Assistant. It allows assistant builders to add up to three test environments to complement Draft and Live.
Let’s look at an example of a team managing the lifecycle of an enterprise-level virtual agent in the new Watson Assistant experience.
Publishing a version
A telecommunications company with offices across Europe and the Americas forms a team to launch a virtual assistant to complement its customer care division. This team is large, multidisciplinary, and designed to represent the perspective of both the company and the users.
A call center expert, a user experience designer, and a marketing executive form an editorial team and collaborate on writing the assistant’s first two actions. The actions are simple, checking the status of a promo code and answering questions about service availability.
Focusing on two common, easy-to-resolve requests allows the team to get the first version built and previewed quickly. Once the first two actions are created, the team tests their draft content by sharing the preview link with colleagues.
The team captures this first pass at their actions by creating version 1 (V1) of their content. The team now has the option of publishing V1 to an environment, but they received a lot of useful notes from their colleagues who previewed V1, so they leave it in the version bank and proceed to edit their actions based on the feedback.
Once the team rewrites and refines its actions, they again share the new draft content via preview. With the team satisfied that the assistant can adequately solve common customer requests, and that it can do so in a way that aligns with the company’s identity, they publish V2 to the ‘Review’ environment and begin the testing process.
Testing across multiple environments
The development, legal, and executive teams all need to review the assistant before it can be deployed on a live channel. To keep the testing process focused and efficient, the team engineers a testing funnel where different subject matter experts sign off on V2 progressively.
The team creates three test environments:
- Review — the legal and business teams review content for compliance and accuracy
- Test — the development team configures and tests the assistant on different channels
- Staging — the assistant is deployed on a test website to review performance, channel configurations, and showcase the final product for the executive team
IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) allows the team to set access for each environment. The development lead opens environment settings, copies the respective environment IDs, then uses IAM to assign the various team members’ environment access.
Once the various team members have their respective access policies defined, the testing process kicks off with business and legal reviewing V2 in the Review environment. The assistant will be deployed on channels in Europe, so the legal team vets the content for compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The business team notes that one of the actions focuses on a promotional offer that is set to be deprecated and informs the editorial team that new content will be needed to replace the action in the near future.
Once legal and business sign off, V2 is assigned to Test. The development team configures the assistant for SMS with Twilio and Hubspot, the company’s preferred customer relationship management platform. This test ensures the assistant’s messaging functionality and ability to retrieve customer information are sound.
Finally, V2 is assigned to Staging, connected to various channel integrations, and deployed to the staging website. The whole team tests the assistant’s performance in a wide range of scenarios and, when the lead of business reviews the team’s report and signs off, V2 is deployed to the live environment.
Switching and reverting
The assistant performs well in its initial deployment, successfully completing the majority of its actions and deflecting significant traffic from the help desk. However, the expiration of the promo code covered in one of the actions is approaching.
There’s going to be an interim of one month between when the current promotion ends and the next promotion begins. While V2 is live, the editorial team prepares a new version (V3) that lets the user know the promo has expired and a new one will be starting soon. V3 goes through the test funnel and is ready to deploy between when the current promo code expires and the next promotion begins.
Once the promo code expires, the team lead uses the Switch version function and assigns V3 to the live environment, then goes into the Draft environment, clicks Revert, and selects V2. This pulls the V2 content back into Draft environment, overwriting unpublished edits and letting the team make the necessary changes.
Once the content team has rewritten the action to account for the upcoming promotional offer, they publish the newly edited content as V4 and the testing process kicks off anew. V4 proceeds through the various environments, clearing approval from the legal, business, and development teams.
Once the new promotion kicks off, the team switches versions in the live environment to V4. The team checks the logs the next day and finds that customers are successfully resolving their requests for information regarding both the expired and new promo codes. The team has succeeded in keeping their assistant up to date without needing to remove and redeploy their assistant to their website!
Ready to get started with multiple environments?
The multiple environments feature is live! It’s also just one of several powerful features the team has added to Watson Assistant recently.
Consult Watson Assistant’s product documentation for more information on multiple environments, including extending your assistant with webhooks, and read Part IV of our Getting Started series for more on Watson Assistant’s lifecycle management.
