Lansa Connector

This interface is intended for all companies that use the LANSA development environment. This concerns organizations that wish to further enhance their processes for structuring their application development and making it more secure, whether they are working inside or outside of the environment. This desire for structuring could be part of a process for:

• Fulfilling audit requirements with respect to the traceability of source code archives, including LANSA source code,
• Improving development quality, or
• Increased configuration control of parallel development in the event of large, simultaneous changes.

The solution to these issues lies in implementing a superior software configuration management tool. Of course, the tool must integrate the management of all of the various development entities handled in LANSA. For various reasons, the tools that have been available on the market up to now provide incomplete solutions.

THE SOLUTION

The ARCAD LANSA Interface allows you to manage LANSA changes from within the framework of the ARCAD-Skipper SCM. LANSA definitions are checked out, developed like any other IBM i components. Combine this with LANSA cross-reference capabilities, and you can manage LANSA changes with ease.
ARCAD for LANSA is an interface with a level of flexibly and detail designed to meet your needs in software configuration management. The interface is done at the LANSA component level (entities characteristic of the CASE tool) which ensures all functions of configuration management (including check-out/check-in) apply during the change phase of "LANSA source code." If you are looking for a tool that simply manages the transfer to production phase without managing the development side, please refer to the ARCAD-Deliver page.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

To manage LANSA components, definitions of CASE tool entities are created using ARCAD component types. These types identify all the components of a LANSA partition so that they can be managed like any other standard component. The check-in/check-out functions are provided by intercepting changes made to the LANSA definitions. This allows conflict management on LANSA components during the development phase. In this mode of operation, LANSA task monitoring is activated, and ARCAD maintenance reports are linked to ensure maximum traceability of changes to components. Development is accomplished in a version using the classic ARCAD configuration management process.

THE ADVANTAGES

LANSA development teams can use the same development process as classic/IBMi or new technology teams. If your development process involves multiple technologies, you can standardize the change process using ARCAD-Skipper as one single SCM for every technology.

Integrating teams of LANSA developers in standard configuration management brings all the advantages of conventional SCM:

• Organizational structure
• Improved team productivity
• Security and safety of operations
• Smooth flow of changes from development to production
• Traceability (SOX process, for example)
• Sharing and synchronizing multi-technology testing/production processes

In ARCAD, this interface was designed to work in the lower layers of the product’s core technology for a natural fit with existing procedures, and thus does not require multiple processes. To the greatest extent possible, transparency for developers and interfaces has been taken into account. The result is an interface that fits perfectly with LANSA standards and ARCAD procedures.