Changelogic Product Overview

• Changelogic
• Product Overview

Introduction

Changelogic is a configuration management tool based on a freeware version control tool CVS, which is meant for small and medium size IT development and management enterprises as a support tool for software development processes.

What does Changelogic offer?

• Changelogic offers systematized processes for software development and management. Systematized processes are repeatable, measurable and can therefore be optimized.
• Changelogic offers a better overview of the software development process, thus creating better opportunities for outsourcing and for including partners in the development process.
• Changelogic enables fast response to business needs, thus increasing the competitive edge of software systems and IT responsiveness to business.
• Changelogic makes it possible for the organisation to reduce risks concerning software releases, thus avoiding costs coming from faulty or incomplete releases and also reducing the applications’ downtime; the latter enables the IT department to meet SLA (Service Level Agreement) requirements.

Changelogic aims to offer to its customers capitalize on their investments and bring values that remain consistent and up-to-date while new technologies, development tools and methodologies come and go.

How does Changelogic realise its offers?

1. Systematised processes

Changelogic supports out-of-the-box five most common processes of day-to-day software development – task management, change management, staging, test case management and release cycle management.

Task management enables monitoring of all needs, development tasks, enhancements and errors in a project. Requirements go through the following stages: pre-check, which includes a needs analysis and decisions on scope and deadlines; implementation, where the task is bound with changes and realised; post-check, which essentially is a check whether or not the result complies too initial needs.

Change management enables monitoring of all changes made in the code base and benchmarking them to requirements. All changes go through the following stages: development, during which the requirements are realised in the code base; review, which includes reviewing the modified source code and deciding whether or not the change is consistent; and integration, during which the modified code is inserted into the release branches where the change was planned.

Staging, i.e. release management enables monitoring how different versions of the source code, which were created during the change, reach test environments, pass acceptance tests and reach production environments.

Test case management enables describing test cases, defining acceptance procedures from test cases and entering test case runs with different versions.

Release cycle management enables planning tasks into release cycles, monitoring the progress of the cycles and planning releases from the cycle.

2. How does Changelogic enable a better overview of the development process?

Changelogic offers a simple web-based user interface for performing most tasks; a few tasks requiring CVS communication are also realized with a simple interface in Ant build scripts often favoured by developers.

Changelogic provides pre-defined processes for the basic elements of the software development process, such as requirements, versions and test cases. At any point of time, Changelogic provides a complete overview of each element’s status and progress so far. The system keeps complete history of all processes.

With every source code version, Changelogic gives information on which task realisations it includes compared to any other version and enables finding the earliest version that includes the realization of this task. This gives a clear and fast overview of which task is implemented in which version and which implementations a particular version contains.

Changelogic enables prioritising all tasks performed during the development process based on a single list and planning the tasks into iterations in order to maintain maximum focus.

Changelogic enables several parties at a time to participate in the development process, while enabling an overview of the activities of all parties simultaneously.

Changelogic makes an effort to actively involve customers in the software development process by making the process of inserting needs and ideas as simple as possible. Customers can submit ideas through a web interface directly. Customers are also informed of any changes by e-mail, which makes Changelogic an important communication channel.

3. How does Changelogic enable faster response to business needs?

The main problems that usually cause delays in release cycles and thus also overdue deliveries are listed below:

1. It is impossible to separate stable parts of the source code from unstable parts. In order to make a release, unstable parts must be stabilised, otherwise there is a risk on putting unstable parts into production
2. To separate stable and unstable code we have to keep multiple branches of the source code, but it is practically impossible to manage over two branches manually
3. The actual influence of changes cannot be anticipated before actually making the changes; after making a change it is virtually impossible to undo it. To overcome such problems, Changelogic offers change and release management tools. This means that all changes are isolated from the main branch and each other, until it is obvious that the risk level of the change is lower or equal to release branches where the change is integrated. To asses and decrease risk, Changelogic has introduced the change review stage, during which the changed code is analysed and, if necessary, returned to the development stage. If it appears during the review stage that a certain change cannot be stabilised by the release deadline, Changelogic offers an option of planning the change into the next release and still meet the release deadline.

The review stage also helps to detect errors early; since the purpose of the change is clear and simple, problems are easier to locate and if the programmer still remembers the code, they can be fixed more quickly.
Both change and release management in Changelogic, including creating branches and planning changes into branches, are based on a web interface, thus being extremely easy to use. This enables people without specific technical skills to plan release cycles.

4. How does Changelogic reduce release risks?

The usual problems that cause the failure of releases are listed below:

1. It is extremely difficult to realise testing before production version upgrade, since it is not known which parts of the software system have been changed. Typically, the application is tested randomly, only the most crucial user sessions are tested, or testing is omitted entirely.
2. There is no acceptance procedure, the application is tested unsystematically.
3. The version upgrade process itself is not tested, for instance, a transition is made directly from the development environment to production.
4. There are problems with different environments, e.g. no separate test environment, testing and production environments are different, etc.

With every task, Changelogic helps to store the information on the earliest version, where to find the realisation of a particular task, etc. With every version, Changelogic specifies realised tasks compared to other versions. For instance, before the next production upgrade it is possible to compare the previous production version and the current candidate and perform a post-check on tasks implemented in the meantime.

The staging process of Changelogic includes a separate step for implementing the acceptance procedure, without which the version cannot go into production. The acceptance procedure itself can consist of test cases, the management option of which Changelogic also offers. The staging process also guarantees that the version that goes through the acceptance procedure is the one going into production.

Changelogic promotes strict separation of environments, i.e. there must be separate development, testing and production environments; in addition to a testing environment, a pre-production or production environment copy is also advised. Separated environments and the acceptance stage also guarantee that a version upgrade is tested through.

What separates Changelogic from competitors?

• Changelogic is freeware-based, and does not require its customers to exchange their version control platform for a proprietary one. This considerably reduces the adoption barrier compared to competitors’ customers, as they need to adopt a proprietary version control platform, which is virtually impossible to replace in the future.
• Changelogic can work on one source code repository without the entire repository being managed by Changelogic. This also reduces the adoption barrier, since the entire organisation does not have to switch to Changelogic.
• Changelogic offers a complete out-of-the-box solution, which includes complete processes that users can enhance and modify. With typical configuration management tools users need to employ additional consultants or build the entire process themselves in addition to making the purchase.
• Changelogic makes configuration management easy, all users have access to a simple web-based interface, and programmers can use an additional interface in the form of a build script to perform tasks involving communication with the version control server. No users are expected to know the details of configuration management primitives.
• Changelogic’s client is closely integrated into the project build scripts, which enables it keep track of internal developments of the project, such as whether or not the source code compilation before check-in was successful.