It has become apparent that SAP teams are requiring faster build, test and deploy development cycles within traditional robust-controlled SAP change processes.
We began to notice this during 2016 when we were approached by several forward thinking organizations in the world looking to boost their DevOps capabilities.
Their main driver, the need to keep up with their counterparts who are developing customer facing digital apps. Their method, SAP DevOps and rapid agile development processes.
As SAP IT support and development teams attempt to move quicker and deliver higher volume of change, we identified three key areas that will support their strategy.
Robust change control process and DevOps
It is absolutely critical that changes are being put through the appropriate process during the build and test phases, before arriving to the CAB for consideration to deploy to production.
The CAB should never be considering untested and undocumented changes, nor be signing off changes they don’t understand!
A robust change control process will set a team up for future SAP DevOps success.
Automation (and enforcement)
Whether it is a workflow, notification, migration, conflict detection, dependency management, document enforcement, release capturing, reapplication, testing, impact assessment or code analysis, automation saves time and effort, allowing teams to progress quicker with safer and predictable outcomes.
The automation (and enforcement) of a robust change control process will become the basis of a team’s SAP DevOps success.
Integration and orchestration
Through automated change control process, developers can receive work requirement notifications and manage their technical build completions, followed by the SAP team testing and preparing for deployment, triggering any automated events to occur with peripheral DevOps tools and business ITSM solution.
Integration and orchestration of the DevOps tool chain is where the true value of automation and DevOps success lay, stripping out lag time and inefficiency and ensuring in process QA.
Although Rev-Trac — an automated SAP change management platform — can help enormously right now, naturally, we have seen areas within the software we can enhance to even better facilitate an SAP DevOps strategy. Here is a quick look at what else is coming:
- Improved parallel development controls – including a workbench for easy analysis and approval, and reports to identify and facilitate in flight parallel developments
- Release level parallel development identification – alerting Release Managers if a common object worked on in a parallel change ticket compromises a release
- Integrations into agile toolkits and further in built agile development support
- Improved Sent Indicator management – to improve the experience for organizations using single change tickets to manage transports from multiple applications
So, if your organization is considering moving towards an agile development methodology or the idea of a seamless DevOps experience throughout the delivery of change across the SAP environment is appealing, perhaps we (and Rev-Trac) can help.
For more information about managing your DevOps capabilities with Rev-Trac, please feel free to contact one of our SAP change management experts.
