DevOps & Agile Development
Automate Your DevOps Strategy and Enable Agile Development for IBM i
Attaining DevOps Benefits in the IBM i World
Put simply DevOps is a set of software development practices that combines software development and IT operations. It enables your IBM i development teams to shorten the software development lifecycle while delivering features, fixes, and frequent updates that are closely aligned with business objectives.
Flexible configuration options within MDChange make it easy to adapt to new workflow strategies and policies as you adopt
DevOps practices across your organization. Whether you are using agile, waterfall, or hybrid development methodologies, you can automate your optimal IBM i software development project workflow:
- Automated development and distribution processes eliminate manual steps and support smooth, frequent, rapid, and complex deployments. This means critical code changes happen quickly.
- Reduce risk associated with new releases with a quality assurance cycle to find and fix issues and, when needed, automatic rollback.
- Automatic notifications and status updates keep development and operations informed.
- Automatic rollback means fast recovery should anything go wrong.
This can sound daunting, but you do not need to set up a complete DevOps environment for all your development teams at once. Begin with a pilot application where it is particularly important to have cross-platform capabilities with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), then move on to larger, more intensive applications.
An Essential Foundation for Agile Development
MDChange’s built-in branching provides exceptional support for agile IBM i development environments. For example, you can have separate branches for different Scrum teams, projects, or applications in which each branch represents a release.
With MDChange, you can analyze and deploy faster, and in a far more structured way, creating functional development and test branches across partitions. In an MDChange branch, you can specify which, and how many, test environments and partitions you would like. Test levels can vary by project, and they operate independently of each other.
When code is ready to go back to the trunk, MDChange checks to see if anything has changed in production since that branch was initiated and the source was copied down for modification. It notifies you if there are conflicts so you can merge those changes before it moves up the path and on to production.
We Can Help
DevOps and agile development are nothing new for Midrange Dynamics North America. Our consultants have years of experience helping our IBM i clients attain their DevOps goals.
Midrange Dynamics itself uses agile development methodology to deliver new functionality to our clients, ensuring easy upgrades and backwards compatibility with previous versions so that you can continually take advantage of new product features.
