Release management best practices

Agile development supports a customer's need to update their production environment as business needs change. Incorporating agile methodology in application development enables frequent changes and ensures that those changes work as expected.

Pega Platform™ includes best practices for agile development, including:

• Real-time updates: frequent development iterations that are small in scope
• Testing: continuous application validation to identify and address issues early
• Branches: concurrent team development environment to maximize productivity

An agile development approach provides continuous, iterative application development based on small-scope business requirements. When business requirements change, you can make smaller, more frequent updates. For example, you add a chatbot based on feedback or fix a bug in the user interface.

DevOps

DevOps tightens the integration between development teams, test teams, and post-go-live support teams to take the agile process further. DevOps teams work across the application life cycle to provide a more automated build, streamlining how you configure, validate, deploy, and deliver an application. 

Match the numbers to the following image to learn more about agile development best practices:

1. Real-time updates including testing: A goal of DevOps is to have production environment changes triggered from a lower environment (for example, from the development environment to the production environment). In agile methodology, automated release management streamlines the release process, monitoring all the stages of testing and deployment.
2. Continuous testing: Continuously test your application to identify issues early. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are the key cornerstones of DevOps. 
3. Continuous integration (CI): CI allows you to regularly merge code changes into a central repository to facilitate automated build and test runs. This process helps you find and address bugs more quickly, improve software quality, and reduce the time to validate and release new code.
4. Continuous delivery (CD): CD code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for potential release to production. Continuous delivery passes code changes through a standardized and automated testing process, then deploys all changes to a testing environment. Code can then be promoted to the production environment or staging environment in preparation for release from the testing environment.
5. Application quality: Use the Application Quality dashboard to continuously monitor application quality. Developing in branches helps to ensure that only quality configurations are introduced. DevOps breaks down the silos in development, quality assurance, and system operations teams. The following figure displays the Application Quality dashboard:
   

As a Pega Business Architect you may work with business stakeholders to test an application, and then deliver that information back to the development team for further refinement as part of the agile development process.

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This Topic is available in the following Modules:

• Application deployment for Business Architects v2
• Application deployment for Business Architects v3