Product, Application, or Release Lifecycle Management, which is important to you? All three begin with the initial idea or concept straight through to final deployment into Production, so all three have the same basic definition and benefits. All three exist to meet the challenges and needs to provide greater control over production and the security of data. The main focus of this article is Release Management and how Business Objects has added Release Management to its suite of products.
Release Lifecycle Management has the goal of protecting the live or production environment and controls the release of new reports or programs into that production environment.
Benefits
As needs and requirements change or bugs become apparent, improvements to the reports and/or software programs become necessary. Release Management provides the following benefits:
- Resource requirements can be planned in advance
- Provides a structured approach leading to efficiency and effectiveness in the overall process
- Multiple changes can be bundled together within a single release thereby minimizing impact on the end user
- Testing verifies correct usability, functionality, and correctness of data prior to release
- Provides version control and central storage
By following the steps of lifecycle management the greatest benefit is the savings of cost and time because reports will not be released into production with obvious mistakes or bugs. All changes will be noted and prior versions available if rollback becomes necessary.
Why is Lifecycle Management Important?
Due to increasingly complex regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, there is a need for a higher level of control over upgrades in software or reports. Internal Controls are necessary to show what changes and how changes are made and who can access the production systems.
The very basic principle of lifecycle management is separation. Environments for Development, Test, and Production will avoid software or reports being deployed that haven’t been fully tested and that meet final business requirements and expectations. The Development region should be used to develop reports. Use the Test region to validate reports, test security, as well as for testing software fixes. Production is just that, Production, and should be used as that. Any changes that need to be made to a report should cause the report to be dropped back to Development; changes made, migrated to Test for testing, and then migrated back to Production when complete and ready for final release.
Business Objects Lifecycle Management Tool
With its latest release of Business Objects XI, a lifecycle management tool has been added to its suite of products. It is a stand-alone web application that requires no additional licensing. It gives complete granular control over which objects are selected. The tool provides dependency checking and analysis as well as test promotion capability. Auditing is available to determine what happened and when there is an issue rollback becomes a non-issue. Version Control is completely integrated with the lifecycle management tool. Finally, it includes a database connection with override and mapping functionality.
Now that Business Objects has included Lifecycle Management to its suite of products, it has the capability of meeting even the strictest regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] up on a previous blog post, I thought it might be worth sharing some details about Business Objects’ new Lifecycle [...]