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Author's profile photo Bärbel Winkler

Setting up a central ATC-system – Part 4: The final stretch

This is part 4 of my ongoing blog series about setting up our central ATC system. For the overall journey, please see the long, long winding road edition.

Part 1: Setting the stage and Part 2: Preparing the systems and Part 3: Tweaking the settings to our liking

As mentioned at the end of Part 3, I had planned some sessions with our developers (inhouse and external) to get them up to speed with the coming changes to a) the ATC-checks and b) the transport-release process.


Getting the developers clued in

I created both a German and an English version of the presentation as we have a rather heterogenous setup as far as development activities go:

  • A small inhouse developer team I’m a part of
  • Colleagues within our process/functional teams who do some coding
  • External developers in Germany who regularly work on site
  • Fairly independent inhouse developer teams in some other locations where they have rather specific development needs (e.g. in Brazil)
  • Temporarily contracted developers for specific tasks in some locations where we often don’t have much if any direct contact with the developers

Obviously, doing presentations was easier for some of these groups than for others! For our internal and external inhouse developers I offered two meetings in German with the added option to join virtually for those working from home. I also did a WebEx-session in English for the developer leads in Brazil and the U.S.

For everybody – including the contracted developers – the presentations have been made available as PDF-files included in our Developement Guidelines which in turn are already available and accessible to everybody via a Confluence space.

Based on the presentations and on what I learned while setting up the ATC, I also prepared an FAQ-page and made it readily available via our guidelines-space.


Collecting feedback

When planning the sessions, I had allowed enough time to discuss any questions which might come up. One of those was how to best deal with findings preventing the release of a transport. Comments ranged from “developers will simply use the pseudo-comment if one is available” or “they’ll just request an exemption with the expectation that it’ll be granted quickly” to “findings should be detected and fixed before even releasing the transport”. These discussions most definitely helped to shape the FAQ-page!

After the second workshop, the new check-variant from the central system was activated in the development systems but without yet turning on blocking on transport release in case of priority 1 and 2 findings. The developers were invited to take a close look at the check-results  they get in the normal course of their work and to collect feedback for things like findings where the priority might still need to be tweaked. The exemption process was also activated so that the developers could try it out without it having any real consequences yet.

In order to hopefully alleviate some “fears”, my presentation contained a slide with some key take-aways:


Ironing out some final kinks

While working on the presentations and grabbing detailed screenshots for them, I noticed a little and potentially confusing issue with the way exemptions were shown in the result list: all of them showed “Has Pragma” even though they were actually exempted by being included in the baseline. As I hadn’t received any responses to my question about this, I had opened an OSS-message and was quite surprised when it was directly and without any delay or further questions forwarded to development support within a day. I don’t remember that ever happening to me before!

This turned out to also be a good way to correct the support user’s settings which needed some added authorizations and access in order to reproduce the issue in the development system and the central ATC-system – something which we hadn’t yet had on our radar for this new setup. So, quite a good thing that we happened upon this before we ran into any issues later when the system was live!

As of this writing, the OSS message is on hold as it will require more than a quick bug fix to get corrected. Once we hear back, I’l update my question with the information about the provided solution.

Throughout the process of getting the central ATC-system setup we had to do a bit of tweaking to the various authorizations. The devil with those really lies in the details! In the end, we ended up with these settings:


Summary of our journey thus far

Even though this project to set up our central ATC-system took longer than expected, it was still a fairly straightforward thing to do. What really helped a lot was the good documentation provided both within the ATC-system and here in the SAP Community where esp. Olga Dolinskaja’s blog posts  laid out the to-do’s fairly clearly. It also obviously helped that we were doing it on a relaxed project time line as it didn’t really much matter when it went live. Doing the first trial runs with sandbox systems proved to be a very valuable time investment and avoided “annoying” developers unneccesarily in the actual dev-systems.

Bottom line – and I hope actually working with the central checks from now on will prove me right on this! – investing the resources (money and time) to set up a central ATC-system is well worth it!

This will most likely be the final episode in this blog series as the only thing left to do is to enable blocking of transport release with priority 1 and 2 findings a couple of weeks from now. But that is just a simple “flip of a switch” so not really worth writing home about! This doesn’t rule out that I may write a kind of epilogue once we’ve had this running for a couple of months – and if there’s then anything interesting to report.


I hope you find this blog series helpful and I’d be interested to read about your experiences with central ATC-checks in the comments!

Here are the links to the other parts of the series for easy reference:

Part 1: Setting the stage

Part 2: Preparing the systems

Part 3: Tweaking the settings to our liking

Part 5: Keeping an eye on things (January 2019)

Part 6 – accumulated FAQs (March 2021)

For the overall journey, please see the long, long winding road edition.

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      16 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Mike Pokraka
      Mike Pokraka

      Hi Bärbel,

      It's nice to see you finally got it off the ground. Thank you for sharing your experiences in such a coherent and easy to follow manner. I've learnt from it and I'm sure it will help many others.

      Regards,
      Mike

      Author's profile photo Bärbel Winkler
      Bärbel Winkler
      Blog Post Author

      Thanks for the feedback, Mike!

      Cheers

      Bärbel

      Author's profile photo Nabheet Madan
      Nabheet Madan

      Thanks Bärbel Winkler for an awesome series. Your recent blog actually reminded me of this.  We might have to implement something on similar lines sometimes early next year. This will definitely help.

      Keep sharing your experience

      Nabheet

       

      Author's profile photo Bärbel Winkler
      Bärbel Winkler
      Blog Post Author

      Thanks for your kind feedback, Nabheet! If there's anything to report, I plan to add it to the most relevant post either right in the text or as a comment.

      Cheers

      Bärbel

       

      Author's profile photo Nicolaas Johannes Van Zyl
      Nicolaas Johannes Van Zyl

      Hi Bärbel Winkler ,

      Hope all is well apologies for the intrusion.

      I am looking for the link to your FAQ presentation mentioned in this page,

      Can you please send me link for this following " I also prepared an FAQ-page and made it readily available via our guidelines-space."

      Best Regards,

      Johan

      Author's profile photo Bärbel Winkler
      Bärbel Winkler
      Blog Post Author

      Nicolaas Johannes Van Zyl

      Hi Nicolaas,

      thanks for your interest, but the list of FAQs is only available within the company network so I cannot share this externally.

      Do you think that our list of FAQs might be of interest for others (and not be already covered in Olga Dolinskaja's many blog posts)? If yes, I could put them into another blog post in my series - something which hasn't yet occurred to me to do.

      Cheers

      Bärbel

      Author's profile photo Bärbel Winkler
      Bärbel Winkler
      Blog Post Author

      I went ahead and published a blog post as part #6 of my series which includes our FAQs.

      Author's profile photo Sudheer Amarabada
      Sudheer Amarabada

      Hi Barbel,

       

      We are trying to setup Central ATC to execute ATC in a system with version 700.

      As we are getting an error 'Function module RS_ABAP_CHECK_PROGRAM_E' when we are creating Run Series, we have implemented SAP Note 3237749. But after implementing the Note we getting another error 'Syntax error in program SAPLSABP_COMP_PROCS_E'.

      Can you please guide me how can I resolve this issue.

       

      Thanks & Regards,

      Sudheer

      Author's profile photo Bärbel Winkler
      Bärbel Winkler
      Blog Post Author

      Sudheer Amarabada

      Hi Sudheer,

      I'm afraid that I won't be able to help much - you might have more success posting the question in the comment thread of one of Olga Dolinskaja's blog posts about the ATC. She'll know if this is an issue which might require an actual OSS incident with SAP support.

      Hope this helps at least somewhat.

      Cheers

      Bärbel

      Author's profile photo Kavita Mane
      Kavita Mane

      Hello Barbel,

      I need assistance to identify variant which can help to execute below checks via ATC.

      1. Securing all tcodes for custom program through AUTHORITY-CHECK statement with functional restriction.
      2. Securing all tcodes for custom table maintenance through AUTHORITY-CHECK statement with functional restriction.
      3. Securing all custom tables through AUTHORIZATION GROUP.

      Regards

      Kavita

      Author's profile photo Bärbel Winkler
      Bärbel Winkler
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Kavita,

      I don't think that this is doable via ATC as the check applies to ABAP-code and neither transactions nor DDIC-objects.

      Cheers

      Bärbel

      Author's profile photo Kavita Mane
      Kavita Mane

      Thanks Barbel for your quick reply.

      Author's profile photo Kavita Mane
      Kavita Mane

      Hello Barbel,

      We have successfully setup Central ATC and able to execute ATC via Central ATC system. Before we handover the tool to Developer, we would like to Baseline everything in the satellite system so that developer can run ATC on newly developed/Changed code and old legacy code can be exempted already by Baseline functionality.

      Currently we have Baseline code on Z transport layer for our systems. I would like to know, do we need to baseline code for SAP Transport layer as well?.

      Could you please provide any inputs on this.

       

      Regards

      Kavita

       

       

      Author's profile photo Bärbel Winkler
      Bärbel Winkler
      Blog Post Author

      Kavita Mane

      Hi Kavita,

      I'm not really sure what you mean by your distinction via the transport layer. I simply executed the checks I wanted via a dedicated check variant in the central system for all objects in Z-packages in the relevant satellite systems. These runs took a couple of hours to execute but once done, I marked the results as "baseline" and from then on, these were taken into accout to no longer report findings found in the baseline.

      The details are described in Part 3 of my blog series.

      Hope this helps

      Cheers

      Bärbel

      Author's profile photo Kavita Mane
      Kavita Mane

      Thanks Barbel for your response. Can we use Transport Layer Option instead of Z* Package while we select Objects to check for mass ATC run to Baseline the code.

      And Do we need to Baseline SAP Transport Layer as well ?

      I have attached screen to make it more clear.

       

      Author's profile photo Bärbel Winkler
      Bärbel Winkler
      Blog Post Author

      Kavita Mane

      Hi Kavita,

      I don't see a reason why not as it's a possible option. Given that I did the selection via the package only, I however don't know how the object sample would differ. The important thing with creating the baseline is that most custom objects are captured to avoid annoying developers with too many prio 1 and errors for old changes. This is an area where I think that the 80:20 rule applies, meaning that it's good enough if it works in 80% of the easy to capture case while ignoring the rest which would cause a lot more effort to get. In all likelihood, you'll get +90% of objects with either selection.

      Cheers

      Bärbel

      P.S.: Comment threads to blog posts are easier to follow if you use "reply" to a comment instead of starting a new comment thread.