Thursday, November 6, 2008

Configuration management

I'd really like a bit more feedback from the TIA community on my blog postings. Sometimes I am wondering if anyone is actually out there :-). I did see some of you on our International Partner Symposium Thursday/Friday last week, but there has to be more of you with an opinion!

To stir things up a bit - let me introduce a pretty interesting topic - configuration management.

In TIA we have the Workbench. This is a tool designed for many things (maybe too many actually). Among other things we are currently using it internally to manage the source code and configuration management of our releases.

Now - my question is - who amongst our customers and partners cares about the workbench? if so - what are you using it for - managing source code, customization and deployment?

Right now we are having many discussions internally in TIA about the Workbench and configuration management in general. Partly because we are growing significantly in terms of people involved in development, and partly because new Java components (other than PL/SQL object) are being introduced (which not necessarily are closely related to the Workbench).

What are your thoughts and comments to this topic? Do you care about the Workbench? Please post your comments to this article...

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sure, there is someone.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that biggest obstacle for commenting or this sort of discussions is corporate code, that we need to obey.

Flemming Louw-Reimer said...

Hi anonymous...

I would expect it to be fairly safe to have an opinion and express it with regards to this topic...

Anonymous said...

Perhaps you could share TIA’s motivation for keeping workbench alive, rather than replacing it with a modern, standard tool? Is this just a case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome or does workbench provides distinct benefits that you guys feel other tools cannot provide?

Matt said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Matt said...

I’ve been using the WB (and MONA before it) for many years on projects. The main reasons I’ve used the WB is that it’s easy to load up and manage TIA releases and project releases too; it works ok for version management and release management. I’ve rarely used the issue management and case system as customers generally have their own system for this which they want to be under their control.
I guess the WB is a bit of a Swiss Army Knife and perhaps does have too wide a remit but for the use I put it to it is adequate.
From a customer perspective almost every TIA implementer knows the WB and how to use it so it gives the customer flexibility in choosing implementers from the market.
If you are going to replace the WB with some other standard system then please make sure that you don’t increase the cost of upgrading TIA to the customer by increasing the complexity of version control and release configuration. Any new system should be cost neutral or have real benefits to the customer not just a cost saving for TIA Tech.

Flemming Louw-Reimer said...

We are not planning replacing WB anytime soon, but we are interested in understanding the use of it. Matt, I agree on your comments to the benefits. We should only replace it provided there is a better alternative for the customers.

Anonymous said...

As TIA moves to java and JDeveloper I would expect that the workbench is to be replaced by subversion. Subversion has a groving userbase and is supported by more and more developer tool, i.e. Toad that we also use a lot.

Flemming Louw-Reimer said...

Hi Rune

Thanks for your comment. Yes, subversion is definately one of the alternatives we are considering. We are currently using it internally in TIA to manage our Java bits...

Kazik Pogoda said...

Approach to source code management differs in PL/SQL and Java projects. The artifacts being effect of the "build" or "release" procedures have slightly different nature. From the other side in typical TIA implementation with Java based front-end, releases from both worlds are usually tightly coupled and release manages have to take care of proper versioning and proper deployment sequence in all the tiers. It would be very nice to have source code management tool able to keep in one place code from all the tiers of concrete TIA implementation. It could be built on top of subversion, git or any other decent SCM system.