ActiveControl offers support for branched SAP development streams, such as when a Production Support development stream is copied to a project development stream to allow project changes to be made in parallel to and independent of continuing Production Support changes.
The problem to be overcome with branched development systems is ensuring that Production Support changes are applied completely, correctly and at the right time to the project development stream. ActiveControl provides various functionality to help manage and control branched development streams as an integrated whole by:
- Tracking when changes must be applied to the project development system.
- Maximising productivity by analysing changes to determine those that can be automatically applied and those which must be manually merged because of conflicts with project work already undertaken.
- Providing a reconciliation capability to give confidence that all changes have been applied completely and without regression.
It is important to note that whilst the methodology for managing branched development systems may result in production support transport requests being imported into the project development system, such transport requests are not imported into the downstream systems of the project development stream, such as the project Quality Assurance system. Instead, ActiveControl creates special transport requests called Merge requests (similar in nature to backup requests) in the project development system and it is these requests that are transported throughout the project development stream. This differentiation is made to reduce complexity and confusion caused by transports being source from multiple systems.
The rest of this section summaries the features within ActiveControl that support managing parallel Development tracks:
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