Just when you thought you’d seen everything after 20+ years in the ever-changing SAP world, you come across something new.
That is a customer who required a continuous delivery pipeline for SAP changes.
As part of the scope of work, the organization wanted a seamless integration with legacy tools including Jira, ServiceNow, while dipping a toe in the water with Micro Focus and Jenkins.
This blog isn’t going to be about a success story, although I’m happy to say that the customer has already gone live with their Rev-Trac based SAP continuous delivery process.
Instead, it’s a quick reflection on the key foundational pieces required to establish the workflow – at a relatively fast pace.
In no particular order, here are the top three foundational areas that were critical to this project’s success.
REST API’s needed for continuous delivery process
If you had asked me about REST APIs a year ago, my response would have been something like; “are they used when the other APIs go on vacation”.
Putting the bad humor aside, my awareness of REST API’s was limited, to say the least, but I knew that our Rev-Trac development team was hard at work, creating them.
After this project, I have a much better understanding of the importance of REST APIs in terms of security, flexibility and robustness.
It’s safe to say that this continuous integration project couldn’t have been completed with traditional web-services based APIs.
Stable Software
When you’re breaking new ground and delivering on demanding customer requirements, you don’t have time to deal with core software issues (bugs) or compatibility concerns.
Otherwise, you’d be taking two steps forward and three steps back – never getting anywhere.
Rev-Trac software has been around for more than 20 years.
It’s battle-tested and proven, no matter what your organization’s requirements are – Cloud and hybrid scenarios, N+1 environments, WebIDE-based changes, and more.
Experienced resources
When you’re stretching the boundaries of possibility with a cutting-edge SAP continuous delivery process, experienced resources are critical to success.
From the Rev-Trac perspective, we have the deeply experienced team to set up the necessary webhooks, listeners and other required connections.
On the customer side, the internal applications which are part of the process need similar resources.
I’m happy to say that we worked with some of the best Jira and ServiceNow resources for this project.
That was a significant key to success, and we even learned some great new things along the way from their team.
I’m personally looking forward to the next SAP continuous delivery project with another customer so that we can overcome some new challenges together.
If you want to talk about your organizations SAP Agile, DevOps or CI/CD plans, reach out to one of our SAP change management experts.