Yeah where I work product people tend to deploy UAT or QA environments. They do it in jenkins, because a stack consists of multiple services, and they may want to choose which branch to deploy. It would be cumbersome to type a combination of branch names in chat.

However, if your UAT is a manual refresh with no branch names, for example, that seems perfectly reasonable (so long as it's triggering a pipeline like you mentioned).

However if I worked where you worked and you wanted slack to deploy prod, I'd probably try to talk you out of it.

Good to get some insights in this; in our case, we always deploy our develop branch to UAT. Because our releasable code is all the business cares about. We have another SIT environment that we sometimes use for feature branches.

My annoyance at the moment is that business side will often ask "have we deployed the latest code to UAT?", to which I quickly open Jenkins, check when the latest job ran, and revert back to them. I have tried just linking the Jenkins URL back to them, as to say, "look it up yourself". But I suspect business people just don't want to touch Jenkins, because it's a "technical tool". So my idea has always to been build a simple chat bot, where they can ask when the latest deployment was, and where they'll be able to trigger a new UAT deployment.

> However if I worked where you worked and you wanted slack to deploy prod, I'd probably try to talk you out of it.

We have pretty strict deployment processes for prod, where other teams do the deployments, and it's not even allowed to automate that.

What I would debate doing in your use-case is have every merge to "develop" branch automatically trigger a deploy to UAT (another option is to set an autobuild every night). There's a jenkins plugin for that.