Enterprise change pipeline
Enterprise change pipelines support migrating development changes from one Pega environment to another. Developers can use these pipelines to migrate development changes through branch merging and validation, application packaging, artifact repository management, deployments, test execution, guardrail compliance, and test coverage enforcement.
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Transcript
This this video will explain how an enterprise change pipeline facilitates initial deployment and additional structural and technical changes made by the developers in the implementation application outside the business release cycle.
A typical decision management project includes five environments. A Development environment to develop enterprise features (System of record), the UAT/Staging environment to test the changes and analyze technical impact, a Business Operations Environment (BOE) to make business changes, a production system to serve customers with the most recent artifacts, and an orchestrator to manage and automate deploying artifacts from one environment to another.
The enterprise change pipeline is used to migrate core application changes that the development team releases.
The development team and the enterprise capabilities team work on core application changes as part of enterprise release cycles to improve the application and to meet project requirements.
After they complete the initial development phase and unit-test the changes in the development environment, the system verifies whether the rules are following development standards in policy, validates test rulesets, branches, and missing rule references as per the application compliance.
Similarly to deployment processes, a predefined product rule exports and migrates the rules from one environment to another. After validation, the new application package is created and sent by the system to the repository.
As the next step, the application package is deployed from the repository to the higher environments.
The enterprise change pipeline is used to promote initial deployment of the applications and enterprise change deployment of the ongoing enhancements
The initial deployment is triggered after the enterprise capabilities and the core structure of Pega Customer Decision Hub™ is set up.
In the development environment, Pega Customer Decision Hub is installed, and Pega Customer Decision Hub setup wizard is run. The wizard generates two additional applications:1:1 Operations Manager the overlay application, built on Customer Decision Hub. 1:1 Operations Manager extension with predefined configuration to set the stage for change management. The Operations Manager extension is built on Pega 1:1 Operations Manager. Build both Customer Decision Hub and the 1:1 Operations Manager extension applications on Pega DevOps to use the Deployment Manager features during migration.
The staging, BOE, and the production environments must have Pega Platform™, DevOps, and Customer Decision Hub installed. They also must have access to the repository.
When the project reaches a mature state and is ready for change management, the initial deployment is triggered. The developed enterprise capabilities and the core structure of Customer Decision Hub is pushed from the development environment to the other environments using the enterprise change pipeline.
Post deployment, your system is under change management. The business teams can perform business changes through the change request process from the business operations environment.
After the initial deployment, to meet more business requirements, you enhance Customer Decision Hub on an ongoing basis in the development environment. For example, create a new customer property, integrate an additional channel, add an additional approval for the Operations Manager workflow.
When the enterprise changes are deployed, only the rulesets of the implementation application and the data instances are moved.
A project might have multiple enterprise change pipelines to merge ongoing regular developments. For example, one that deploys developer changes made to Customer Decision Hub implementation application and another to deploy developer changes made to the 1:1 Operations Manager extension application.
As a best practice, create a new ruleset version to make enhancements to the applications. Updates to application are handled through typical developer practices such as branching and ruleset lock-and-roll.
In summary, you start with development in the development environment after running the Customer Decision Hub setup wizard. After the development process has matured and is ready for change management, use the enterprise change pipeline to deploy all development changes as part of the initial deployment. From this point, you can use the enterprise change pipeline to deploy ongoing application enhancements to higher environments to meet business objectives, such as adding a new customer property and integrating an additional channel.
Next, use the business change pipeline to deploy business changes, such as adding new actions and treatments to all other environments. Also, migrate production data from the production environment to the business operations environment through the data migration pipeline to simulate the results of the business changes to understand if the business outcomes are as expected.
