Olympic Integration

The delivery of a new version of OLYMPIC - either a full application or a subset of corrected components – always involves the same well-defined tasks that are critical to the overall operation of the information system

THE SOLUTION

ARCAD automates the management of the OLYMPIC Banking System and also its integration into the information system. ARCAD for OLYMPIC is a complete solution for the automatic reception of enhancements or corrections delivered by the ERI Bancaire company. The solution also eases compliance with both internal and external auditing requirements, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Basel 2 Operational Risk, and prepares for quality certification processes such as ISO and CMM.

Olympic reception

After executing a batch of checks, ARCAD will display lists that give precise status of the consistency of the delivered elements. This step reveals whether the delivery should be accepted or refused in its current state. If the delivery is refused, the lists can be presented to ERI Bancaire to justify the decision. If the delivery is accepted, ARCAD will use the cross-references from the repository to run an exhaustive impact analysis. This catalogues the tasks required to integrate the new delivery, and can automate certain tasks such as the retrieval of impacted components into the development environment, their compilation, etc.

After these checks have been run, a request for reception confirmation is made. If the reception is not confirmed, either the process stops there, or a delivery refusal process is triggered to ERI Bancaire. If the reception is confirmed, then the integration process is started.

Olympic integration

The integration of a new OLYMPIC delivery involves the following steps:

• A new version is opened in the integration environment. Various integration tasks will be performed in this version.
• Elements delivered by ERI Bancaire are placed in the version.
• The programs, files, and other specific components impacted by this delivery are analyzed: For each delivered component, the system will consult the cross-references in the ARCAD repository to identify the elements that are impacted in the information system. Of course, the components can originate either from native System i, Windows, or UNIX/Linux.
• Retrieval of these elements into the integration environment: For each impacted element, the system will propose an automatic check-out to retrieve their sources into the integration environment, and allocate them to the particular users assigned to the task.

ARCAD will then use its built-in version management to carry out the following steps:

• Update specific programs (integration tasks).
• Transfer to the test environment for validation. (See the ARCAD-Deliver page for transfer and distribution)
• Transfer to the reference environment.
• Distribution: Transfer via TCP/IP, SNADS, optical or tape to the distributed machine in the production environment.
• Tracking of transfer information on the development machine.

THE ADVANTAGES

This ARCAD for OLYMPIC solution, the result of our collaboration with various vendors and OLYMPIC customers, manages and streamlines the entire delivery process. It guarantees that the elements transferred to production do not cause any regression in the information system, and that no component is omitted during the integration phase.

The system is, of course, fully integrated with version management so that all modifications, compilations and other integration-related tasks are performed under change control. The combination of dedicated and secure environments and automated test procedures guarantees the quality and reliability of the production system. Its solid architecture, associated with automatic documentation generation, satisfies the demands of auditors and management alike.