Revelation Software Concepts Pty Ltd (RSC) today announced the release of the second major enhancement to version 7 of their flagship SAP change control automation software, Rev-Trac. Version 7.2 introduces a new Parallel Development Workbench with features that focus on agility, allowing organizations to introduce continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD) into their production environments to manage and control rapid deployments.
When multiple teams are working in multiple development systems, the inevitability that parallel development will occur is very high. Most of the risk (and costs) stem from requiring change teams to manually manage concurrent changes across parallel development systems (eg, N+1 and Project tracks) that are to be delivered into the same production system. One of the keys for a safe and stable agile operation is control over parallel development.
"The OOPS functionality (Overtake/Overwrite Protection) in Rev-Trac was developed initially to prevent parallel development," said Rick Porter, RSC Vice President of Business Development. "OOPS has now been tooled to "facilitate" parallel development specifically to support today's agile development environments. It has become clear that the automation (and enforcement) of a robust change control process will form the basis of an agile SAP team's success."
Large SAP teams can make up to 1,000 changes per month in their SAP systems and up to 5,000 per month during a project phase where change visibility is crucial to avoid significant hypercare issues after going live. The SPS02 iteration of the Parallel Development Workbench provides a framework with functionality that provides managers with more control and transparency into work that will inevitably result in conflicts when deploying to production or reapplying changes across development tracks. The first set of agility-focused Parallel Development Workbench features includes:
- Queued Parallel development approval: Automated notifications and workflow emails to parties affected by parallel development approvals;
- Ability to search parallel developments by object;
- Improved usability and reporting that displays open parallel developments which have been approved.
Queued Parallel development approval provides users experiencing lock messages to submit their request for parallel development approval into an administrator's queue. The queue entry will remain in the Parallel Development Workbench until an authorized manager approves or rejects the parallel development request. By managing parallel developments in groups from a queue, administrators have time to investigate and view a larger scope of progressing change to make informed and controlled decisions. In a survey of Rev-Trac customers who had previously used a manual non-automated process or system, 74% report more than 7 potentially damaging out of sequence transport migrations are prevented by Rev-Trac per month. (Source: TechValidate TVID: 9AE808ACC.)
Other new features provide easy to navigate methods for investigating the risk or challenges that might be encountered during the parallel development approval process.
The Parallel Development Workbench serves as a platform for future innovation and functional enhancement to allow for Parallel Development controls and capabilities to expand to meet the needs of those organizations pursuing agile and DevOps methodologies within ever increasingly complex SAP environments. Future releases of Rev-Trac will further enhance the Parallel Development Workbench and locking functionality to add more automation and further control over in-flight parallel developments.
