Cut-Over Checks & Activities – Focused Build Standalone Extensions Part 6

In this blog series, I would like to describe a few standalone enhancements in more detail, which can be very helpful in unique situations and can be used independently from the requirements to deploy process from Focused Build.

In this six-part, I want to introduce you to a standalone enhancement which is named Cut-Over Checks & Activities. This extension is particularly useful for you when you have implemented or plan to implement Change Request Management with SAP Solution Manager.

The Challenge

Cut-Over is an essential part of the transport process when you are working in a dual system landscape. This means you have two different development systems that both provide changes to the same production system.

Image 1 : Different Cut Over Strategies

This is SAP’s recommended  system landscape setup when you need to have a very innovative release cycle but still ensure maintainability for your current production system.

But dual system landscapes comes with their own challenges as they increase the complexity for managing transports and for potential conflicts in such a landscape.

One such challenge is at the time of the cut over, when all transports that have been developed in the project branch over several weeks or months are release to the maintenance branch.

At this time you need to validate centrally that:

• All retrofit activities from the landscape landscape are finished and part of the cut-over scope
• That there are no ongoing developments that might conflict with the cut-over scope
• manually select the correct transport and import them in the cut over target system
• manually synchronize the other system in the landscape afterwards.

Until now all these tasks didn’t had any tool support and had to be executed by the basis team executing the cut-over manually.

The latest Focus Build Release SP02 provides a new CHARM extension that is called Cut-Over Checks and Activities.

Cut-Over Checks and Activities

This is a new Assignment Block available for Cycle documents when you have installed the Focus Build component.

It will detect most common cut-over strategies automatically based on the landscape information the solution manager provides and shows a corresponding overview.

The first part cut-over checks, that includes 3 automatic checks that includes:

• validation that all retrofits are executed and in scope of the cut-over cycle to prevent any time of possible down grade based on parallel developments.
• validation that all original transports that have been retrofitted are also imported into the production system,otherwise the cut-over would create over-runner issues
• validate that there are no depended transports missing in your go-live scope for the selected change cycle

The second part are the cut-over activities these provide you with the possibility to import the scope of the cycle in any of the the system from the target landscape.

• Copy transport into the transport buffer of a System
• Execute the import of those transport
• Optional: Adoption of the system originality flag if requested
• System Logon to validate any import logs and issues directly in the managed system

If you are looking for more information about Focused Build and other Focused Solution’s look at these resources:

• Focused Solution Wiki
• Focused Build – Config Guide (Chapter 4 Standalone Extensions)

Other Articles of this Series:

• Cross Landscape Distribution – Focused Build Standalone Extensions Part 1
• Repack – Focused Build Standalone Extensions Part 2
• Simple IT Request – Focused Build Standalone Extensions Part 3
• Test System Refresh – Focused Build Standalone Extensions Part 4
• Release Batch Import – Focused Build Standalone Extensions Part 5