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Change Management can be simple

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In the old-time, you had the SAP R3 ABAP system. There it was a pretty good tool to do change management. There was a limited number of objects that you could change and they could all be managed by one way of handling transports. In the new world, it is a lot more complicated.

Now the landscape is completely different. You have many different services that you need to find a way to manage. And if you start using SAP cloud solutions many of them have their own way of handling transports.

I have created a video to show, how I see the concept in some more details.

You have two options for Change Management: A generic approach or a specialized approach for your most important systems.

Generic Change management

No matter what you need to develop change, everything is handled in the same way. Then all developers know how to do change management for everything. It will speed up making it possible for other developers to handle the tooling.

The downside is that you will need to make a process that can encompass all systems. You will, therefore, get to little information or spend to much time creating the documents that you need for your project.

You may also miss an important part, and that is the ability to like changes both ways

Tool specific change management

If you have a lot of development or highly critical tools. It does make sense to have a better way to handle it.

When we are working on our Java application for the Figaf tool. We use Jira to create tickets in, Developers will then use this ticket number for all commits to a given ticket. Changes to our unit tests are also linked with the ticket. That is allowing us to trace all changes back to a ticket. That is a hyper-specialized tool to make change management for just one case. It can then be bundled with Jenkins to make build and test automation.

This type of specialization of your change management saves you time for your development. Because developers don’t need to note all the different places they are making modifications. It is handled automatically by the tool and captured as a part of the change.

Sure it will cost you more to buy or create an environment. It will cost both money, time and effort to get it working. Hopefully, this investment will be returned with better documentation, easier change management and faster delivery of code.

If you are using SAP Integrations products like SAP PI/PO, CPI or API mgt then we have a tool that will allow you to optimize your delivery process. Check the tools at https://figaf.com/IRT there are even free versions that allow you to get started.

With our approach we will handle all the tool-specific requirements in our application and then let your original system containing all organizational data.

Download Figaf IRT

If you want to see how our tool works to make DevOps possible check this video

SAP PI/PO change tracking tool is now free

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I love getting ideas on how to easier to complete a boring task for SAP PI/PO developers.
I believe quite a few of you remembered the PIDocumenter that I created ten years ago. It was a PHP application that could generate an Excel document with the mapping. This function is now standard with Netweaver Developer Studio, though I would say my version was better formatted. That solution became deprecated because the method to get the XMI file was blocked.
One and a half year ago I started working on a tool to make the testing easier on SAP PI/PO. One of the functions we had could make a comparison of XML documents and read the directory API to understand the landscape. It would be simple to combine the two function to compare a directory comparison function.

I have been working at different places where there was a requirement to document what was transported. And I thought it was difficult(too manual) and time-consuming. But there was not a system in place to handle it so things could be changed so it was out of sync. So I wanted to make a tool that could help in the process.

It became the Change Tracking Tool(CTT).

CTT is a tool that will allow you to find what is changed on any objects, like which switch is changed.
In the Swing tool or NWDS, you can see the different versions of an object. It is though difficult to see which specific field was changed in a change. That is one of the use cases CTT helps with.

The other problem is about registering which change is affecting which objects. This way you can have an easy overview of the changes that are happening in your landscape. So you can register the changes on your change number, so you can easily track the changes together with what happened.

It has was given as a bonus to people buying IRT (Integration Regression Tool). It did though not match which what those organizations were looking for. So now you can get it for free. CTT is a part of the installation IRT so once installed you will have access to both functions. IRT is still a licensed product; you can obtain a trial license to try it out.

Take it for a spin and let me know what you think.

Nb. we will add Repository information later this year.