Define Change Request Management

Use

Every SAP implementation requires that changes be made to the SAP standard software to meet customer needs.

Change request management ensures that customizing changes and development efforts are documented, tested, verified, and transported to production.

The purpose of this task is to define change request management by creating procedures for managing communication among developers, configuration personnel, and technical staff.

Assign responsibilities to all critical areas of change request management, including:

·         Release of a change request

·         Import into the quality assurance (QA) and production environments

·         Verification and sign-off of quality assurance testing

·         Import into other clients and systems

Procedure

1.       Define responsibilities for change requests and tasks. A change request is a collection of changes, called tasks, that can be transported to other clients. Make Business Process Team Leads responsible for the following:

-         Creating a change request

-         Assigning team members to the request

-         Releasing the change request when the team members have finished their changes

·         Releasing a change request indicates that the changes have been unit tested in the development system, and are therefore ready to go to the QA system for testing. These changes will ultimately go to the production system.

·         User authorization and ownership prevents others from releasing change requests for which they are not responsible.

2.       Define procedure for imports into the QA environment. Imports can be performed in coordination with the project teams either on demand or using a fixed schedule.

-         To schedule regular times for imports into the target system (for example daily, weekly, or monthly), you can use the Transport Management System (TMS) import scheduler.

-         With TMS, you can perform imports from within the SAP system.

-         Assign responsibility for imports to a Business Process Team Lead.

·         Because the Business Process Team Lead also releases the change request, imports into the QA system may be performed at time intervals that meet the needs of the project teams.

-         After the import into the target system, allow sufficient time for testing.

3.       Define code freeze and QA testing procedures. The following standards can ensure stable development and QA testing environments:

-         After releasing a change request in the development system, stop further development on the related objects. Freeze the current versions of these objects.

-         After import into the QA system, review the transport logs (export and import).

-         Test the objects in the QA environment. End testing either with a sign-off or further corrections. If corrections are necessary, perform them on the installed version of the object in the development environment.

-         Repeating the above steps can eliminate errors.

-         After successful testing and verification, continue development on the frozen objects.

-         The import queue of the production system contains the original request and all related corrections that were successfully imported into the QA system. To avoid unstable results, perform not only the final transport but also all previous transports.

4.       Establish QA sign-off procedure. Ensure that imports into a production environment occur only after successful testing of the new functionality, including any necessary corrections.

5.       Define procedure for imports into production. Imports into production can occur after sign-off for all objects contained in the import queue of the production system.

-         In TMS, using Start Import (or OS command tp import all) ensures that all original requests, and the related corrections, are applied in the correct order.

-         When importing new or improved functionality, even tested and verified objects can affect the runtime environment of your production system. Therefore, schedule imports into production for times when business data processing (including background processing) is either stopped or at a low level.

-         Ideally, start an import to the production system only after background processing is completed and a backup is made, and finish it before the start of business.

You can use the following tools to help you carry out this task:

·         Customizing Organizer

·         Workbench Organizer

·         Transport Management System

Result

Defined and agreed change request management procedures