THE ISSUE

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 ARCAD LANSA Interface allows you to manage LANSA changes from within the framework of the ARCAD-Skipper change management system. LANSA definitions are checked out, developed, and transferred like any other IBM i components. Combine this with LANSA cross-reference capabilities, and you can manage LANSA changes with ease.
ARCAD for LANSA has two interface levels to respond flexibly to your needs:

• Level 1: Release management allows management of LANSA components and organizes them in a version with the ability to attach maintenance records (relating LANSA tasks to ARCAD Maintenance Records is possible).
• Level 2: Configuration management at the LANSA component level (entities characteristic of the CASE tool) ensures all functions of configuration management (including check-out/check-in) from the change phase of "LANSA source code."

The Level 2 interface uses the features of the Level 1 interface for transfer and traceability functionality.

In ARCAD, these interfaces were designed to work in the lower layers of the product’s core technology for a natural fit with existing procedures, and thus do 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.

Level 1 Interface: Release Management for LANSA Components

To integrate easily and consistently with LANSA, we integrated the concept of the ARCAD application/ environment with the concept of the LANSA partition. For the concept of version/release, we used the elements of component extraction most commonly used by a LANSA developer, namely filtering by date of creation/ modification and/or tasks if task monitoring is activated in the LANSA partition.

Check-in/check-out functions are applied on selected LANSA components to form a release. This allows conflict management to be accomplished well before the testing phase or final transfer to production. This feature provides developers with good visibility and excellent conflict resolution tools.

Second, development is organized in a version; classic ARCAD release management processes apply, bringing integrity control/consistency of versions, traceability, and security from development until transfer to production. It should be noted that these processes are multi-technology. In fact, the LANSA development team uses exactly the same development process as classic/native or new technology teams.

To manage LANSA components, definitions of CASE tool entities were created in component type form (ARCAD DTC technology). This identifies all the components of a LANSA partition so that they can be managed like any other standard OS object. The functions of check-in/check-out are provided by intercepting changes made on these LANSA definitions. This allows conflict management on LANSA components during the development phase (the major advantage compared to the Level 1 interface). In this mode of operation, LANSA task monitoring is activated, and the maintenance record is linked to ensure maximum traceability of components.

Second, development is accomplished in a version using the classic ARCAD configuration management process, bringing integrity control/consistency of versions, traceability, and security from development until transfer to production.

Note that these processes are multi-technology. In fact, the LANSA development team uses the same development process as classic/native or new technology teams.