Document Purpose

Introduction

ActiveControl includes an out-of-the-box Integration Framework which has enabled bi-directional integration capabilities with ITSM products such as JIRA, ServiceNow and HPSM for many years.

More recently, this Integration Framework has evolved to also be used to faciliate Customer requirements to integrate ActiveControl with DevOps and Automated Testing products.

Gitlab Integration as part of a CI/CD pipeline

During early 2018, the ActiveControl Integration Framework capability was extended to include an integration with GitLab, a third-party DevOps product used increasingly within IT organisations to automate aspects of software development building, testing and deployment. This integration was built on the back of a specific requirement for a new Customer wanting to to evolve their continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities in delivering SAP change as part of an ActiveControl workflow (along with non-SAP change delivered outside of ActiveControl).

Gitlab integration to trigger Automated Testing

During early 2020, a Jenkins integration (to trigger automated testing in Selenium) was created as a proof of concept by Basis Technologies. Later in the same year, the triggering of automated testing in Tosca via GitLab as part of an ActiveControl workflow was implemented as part of another new Customer requirement. The rest of this Integration Guide summarises this Gitlab integration capabiity. It should be noted that this document (and Basis Technologies integration solution) is testing tool agnostic; ie the same Gitlab integration could potentially be used to trigger automated testing within different 3rd Party testing products and not just Tosca.

Document Audience

The intended audience for this document are the technical teams looking to implement integration between ActiveControl and GitLab. It does not detail how ActiveControl can be configured to manage the change process and it assumes a reasonable knowledge of standard change processes with SAP, and also an existing working knowledge of ActiveControl administration and configuration.

! The ActiveControl Gitlab integration is currently not an out-of-the-box ‘plug it and play’ Integration in the sense of many of the more established and mature ActiveControl integrations with ITSM tools such as JIRA or ServiceNow. It should be anticipated that some sort of consulting – and possible even development – services will be required to setup the integration, both on the Basis Technologies side and also Customer technology team. Technical expertise on GitLab will also be required on the Customer side for the installation and setup of GitLab. Basis Technologies responsibilities lie in sending the relevant paylod from ActiveControl to Gitlab as an Outbound integration, and in processing the results sent back to ActiveControl as an inbound integration. The Customer technologies team are responsible for processing this information from GitLab out to the automated testing tool , and sending back results (ie pass or fail) to ActiveControl as an inbound integration.