AUGMENT BEST-PRACTICE

SOFTWARE CHANGE MANAGEMENT PROCESSES

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Application Lifecycle Management

IBM i continues to be the strategic platform of choice for organizations that seek unprecedented levels of enterprise application reliability, security, and flexibility. The strength of the platform, however, is only half of the equation.

Successfully managing the development and release of enterprise software is a mission-critical task that can be both daunting and problematic, especially if you don't have the right tools for the job.

Assured end-to-end management of software development and release processes

SoftLanding specializes in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions that help IT teams to design, develop, test, deploy, support, audit, and improve their enterprise applications, regardless of complexity and frequency of change.

Using automation to cut errors, and software change management workflows that enforce repeatable procedures, you can quickly regain control over your application environment, allowing changes to flow smoothly from request through to production.

 

Enhance your software change management capabilities

 

Technical competence

Gaining greater competitive edge continues to be a driving force at the heart of most businesses today. Organizations across the globe turn to IT to provide tangible operational improvements, whether it be to reach new levels of agility that reduce go-to-market times, or to formalize and streamline business processes so that necessary cost savings can be realized.

The adoption of a comprehensive ALM solution can offer new levels of agility, efficiency, control, and reliability, throughout the entire software change process. Additionally, IT accountability is provided, allowing companies to meet the ongoing demands of regulatory audit compliance.

SoftLanding’s Application Lifecycle Management solution, TURNOVER® Lifecycle Manager, leverages the latest technologies to bring you unique features that save your organization time, reduce risk, and improve software quality and reliability.

Application Lifecycle Management from SoftLanding:
  •  Single-Server Solution with the entire TURNOVER solution running on the IBM i
  •  Single Audit Database offering secure and reliable consolidation of all application software change information
  •  Low Impact Implementation allowing setup over your existing library structure for native development
  •  Flexibility and Openness with many APIs that allow custom processing and integration to the tools you already have
  •  Robust Promotion and Recovery using the same process to promote changes into your test environments as well as production
  •  Enforced Workflow that underpins necessary check points across all collaborating departments
  •  Productivity Tools for 5250, Eclipse (RDi, RDP, WDSC), and PC environments

Problem and incident management

If your company is like most today, your IT department must accomplish more with fewer people. Despite everyone's best intentions, end users may not get answers to their technical questions as quickly as they need them, and IT professionals may feel that they are spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with minutiae instead of pushing forward with pro-active initiatives that satisfy the wider needs of the business.

SoftLanding’s Problem and Incident Management solution, TURNOVER® Helpdesk, combines browser-based end user self-service with TURNOVER’s full-service IT Helpdesk for a corporate-wide solution that is underpinned by a single IBM i database. TURNOVER Helpdesk optimizes technical support efficiency so you can improve service response times, focus more easily on priority issues, and leverage the information users provide to improve your software applications.

End users get a fast, easy way to find answers to their own technical questions, enter requests, and track the progress of their issues without tying up technical support personnel. In the event of a new incident being raised, all details are preserved throughout the entire development cycle. With each problem and incident that is raised, TURNOVER creates a seamless flow of information — from the affected department, to project managers, to development, to testers — so issues can be prioritized and resolved in a timely manner while leaving a comprehensive and complete audit trail.

Project management

In the demanding world of business, nothing is constant other than change. It is therefore essential to have solutions that allow you to manage the process of change, suppressing chaos and mitigating risk without compromising quality.

SoftLanding’s Application Lifecycle Management solution, TURNOVER® Lifecycle Manager, features a Project Management system that provides unprecedented control over the success of your projects. TURNOVER allows you to organize multiple projects concurrently and offers workflow, escalation, messaging, and reporting capabilities that help your managers complete projects on time and in budget.

TURNOVER sets the standard for process-oriented software change management with a helpdesk that feeds unresolved issues — and all related information — into its project system. With essential information to hand, project managers can quickly prioritize issues, define the scope of each project, break it into manageable tasks, link specifications to a task, and assign it to a resource.

SoftLanding’s ALM Project Management capabilities provide you with efficient, effective ways to:
  •  Organize projects simply and quickly
  •  Easily review and assign tasks
  •  Implement workflow strategies
  •  Automate reminders with escalation queues
  •  Improve internal communications on projects
  •  Tie working projects to change requests
  •  Track time and costs associated with tasks and projects
  •  Plan new projects more accurately
  •  Prepare for compliance audits

Deployment

Most IT departments are challenged by the ever-increasing pace of innovation brought about by customer demands for continuous improvement. Agile development methodologies are widely adopted, allowing developers to make rapid changes, however bottlenecks will often occur elsewhere in the delivery pipeline.

Without a suitable deployment solution in place, the insurgence of frequent software changes can overload operations teams that are faced with the task of deploying application updates. Balancing application availability with the increased possibility of outages, however, will often result in deployment delays to critical application changes.

TURNOVER Lifecycle Manager removes the pain inherent in software deployments, allowing you to move your application changes into production regularly and reliably. Application changes can be distributed across your entire network to IBM i, Linux, UNIX and Windows servers. The promotion of software changes can be reviewed and managed interchangeably through TURNOVER's 5250, Eclipse, and web user interfaces.

Whether deploying routine fixes or a completely new application, the process is the same, and thorough tracking is provided throughout. The 'how' and 'when' are totally up to you. You can hold distributions and deploy them on a scheduled release pattern, or alternatively, on a continuous basis, as and when change are made.

TURNOVER’s object archiving and automatic recovery capabilities ensure that promotions are completely risk-free. You can synchronize a deployment across your networked systems so that a promotion failure on one system triggers a roll back on all of them. Object archives keep a backup of your source code and objects so that if your installation fails for any reason, TURNOVER can automatically restore your application to its previous state. In addition, TURNOVER monitors unattended and out of hours deployments, so if anything goes wrong, you can be confident that your application will be recovered automatically.

TURNOVER uses the same process to move application changes into your test and QA environments as it does when deploying them to production servers. This repeatable process ensures that your methodology is fully tested and decreases the risk of unexpected issues at deployment time.

Audit compliance

If your organization’s IT environment is subject to regulatory compliance, audits will be a fact of life, and you must be prepared for them. Failure to demonstrate how software changes make it to production is not an option, especially when your corporate reputation is at stake.

SoftLanding has a proven record of helping companies satisfy regulatory compliance, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard, and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), to name just a few.

TURNOVER Lifecycle Manager reinforces your organization’s software change processes across all computing platforms throughout the entire application development lifecycle. Using a single audit database, TURNOVER consolidates all application software change information, regardless of platform, into one place.

This allows you to produce an audit trail of all software changes so that auditors can see that the formal processes you have in place are being followed. Auditors can easily follow a sample set of changes through the entire application lifecycle (issue tracking, project management, development, testing, and deployment), confirming that changes were implemented in a structured manner while complying with mandatory requirements.

TURNOVER makes audit compliance easier by:
  •  Creating a structured framework of repeatable processes across an application’s lifecycle
  •  Implementing a comprehensive security matrix across all features and functions
  •  Enforcing necessary workflow procedures
  •  Providing a suite of detailed reports that facilitate the audit process
  •  Keeping an audit trail of:
    •  who made the initial change request, the reasons behind it, and when it was made
    •  who approved the change
    •  who made the actual change
    •  who approved the change, once made
    •  who deployed the change to production

ALM from SoftLanding provides:

  • Secure access and control of all source code
  • Complete tracking of source code and generated artifacts
  • Reliable software promotions using repeatable settings and processes
  • Improved coordination of activities across dispersed development teams
  • Productivity gains by relieving staff of repetitive and time-consuming tasks
  • Simplified audits for achieving regulatory compliance
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