Dividing the path to maturity into 4 phases, crawl, walk, run and sprint, and differing degrees of automation and tooling are recommended within each phase.
Automation fast-tracks DevOps maturity
The goal of a DevOps approach is the delivery of business solutions at the speed and quality customers demand.
This means one must increase the volume of change delivered and increase the velocity at which it is delivered.
And because quality is important, it means doing so without a reduction in governance or quality control.
It’s easy to increase volume and velocity by throwing governance and QA out the door.
But how are all three, volume, velocity and quality, achieved?
Especially in an environment where a waterfall process, rigorous testing, and governance audit trails have been a traditional requirement.
This is where Rout is proposing automation as the way forward. A proposal I am in 100% agreement with.
From what I have seen and heard, without advanced automation it will not be possible to develop and deliver at the speeds envisaged maintaining adequate quality.
Benefits of automating SAP change mangement
- Manual transport deployment is time consuming and risky
- Managing agile parallel developments is also time consuming and risky
- Managing multiple development streams requires significant transport coordination overhead
- Enabling collaborative workflow is difficult
- Testing takes too long
- Although a one size fits all testing approach is easy, it’s inefficient and time consuming
Where to now?
The advanced automation mentioned by Pravas Ranjan Rout will not be achieved with the one tool, or from the one vendor.
To achieve the kind of automation essential to reaching DevOps maturity, a range of tools from several different vendors will be required.
For example, change control and workflow automation, unit testing automation, regression testing automation, and code review automation are crucial tooling considerations.
Of course, Rev-Trac SAP change control automation is a great place to start.
Beginning with automating and enforcing process workflow, Rev-Trac provides the platform onto which other automated DevOps tooling can be integrated.
The goal, a fully automated DevOps environment delivery change at the volume, speed and quality that DevOps promises.
For more information on automating your SAP change management processes, feel free to reach out to one of our experts.
