Rapid adoption of continuous delivery

We are in the throws of putting together a framework for assisting our clients adopt continuous delivery – we are facilitating this with a number of core offerings.

First and foremost (as you are aware) ERP analytics allows us to identify what is being used, and at the end of the day, retire technical debt.  We can tell you what is being used and by whom.  So armed with this knowledge you can fine tune your retrofit – and you will need to do this!

Secondly we have some software that actually shows the controls that have changed between environments.  It can run over any number of environments and tell you exactly what is different on a form by form and control by control basis.  Therefore, if a row exit is missing, or a field has changed it’s name – we can quickly tell you.  This is going to assist in lowering the amount of testing that you have to do and improve the maturity of what you are releasing to the business for testing.  This is like an advanced impact analysis tool.

Thirdly we implement a blue/green deployment model, as you need to become more agile.  I hear you saying, we are “old school ERP”, we are waterfall…  We don’t make mistakes because we spend months in regression testing. You cannot do this anymore!  You need to be more efficient with your releases and with your testing.  It’s critical to be agile with mod deployment and do an element of “production testing”.  This can be controlled easily and the benefits are huge!

These three simple initiatives combined with project management which is modification centric (based from ERP analytics) allows you to define your “continuous delivery” project.  The process can be summarised as below.

I recommend implementing a 3 month / 4 month cycle – planned for the entire year with all of your release dates with the following high level steps:

Search for ESU’s monthly – change assistant

•Apply them to DV920 no matter what

•Impact analysis based upon ERP analytics

•Change documentation automatically generated

Apply to PY920

•Automatically request retrofit – create projects, add objects, workflow development!

•Retrofit needs to be very modular

•Perhaps look at retrofit more carefully (or completely bespoke)

Testing

•Automated regression testing

•Ensure mods are tested, check with ERP analytics

Release to production

•If problems, regress and fix

•Regression can be a package deployment away!

 

It really is important that we start to treat our ERP a little differently.  Its critical and it’s generally a single source of truth, but we must continue to deliver improvements to our businesses with agility.  Oracle are giving us the ability to do this, we need to embrace it.  I like to think of delivering to clients as if it were SaaS.