Define Transport Strategy

Use

To choose a transport strategy optimally suited to your requirements

SAP recommends that you follow the transport strategy while you plan and set up your system landscape. Overall change management procedures were established in an earlier task.

All users working as developers must know the transport strategy and stick to certain guidelines.

Your transport strategy may depend on which phase of the SAP implementation project you are in.

Procedure

1.       Once a system landscape has been established and clients exist, decide which parts of the project are to be developed in which clients, and into which clients you want to transport your changes.

-         To transport your changes, create transport routes between clients or systems.

-         Define client-specific transport routes by using Extended Transport Control.

-         You must always use transport routes, regardless of your transport strategy.

2.       Define a strategy for maintaining the system landscape. Distribute all changes in the form of change requests. Change request management is the only recommended procedure for maintaining the system landscape. Your strategy must provide:

-         A schedule for the importing of changes into each client

-         Quality assurance and testing verification at specific stages

3.       Determine who is responsible for importing change requests into clients and systems, and schedule transports for the imports so as to group related objects developed by different developers. To ensure consistent development, all related changes must be transported at the same time.

-         For example, an error can occur if a developer creates a table that references a data element created by another developer and the change request that contains the table is imported into a target system in which the data element does not exist.

4.       To keep these dependencies under control, it is a good idea to make a fixed transport schedule, in which all changes released up until a certain fixed date are transported into a client or SAP system.

-         For example, if changes are imported once an hour into the quality assurance system, developers can test their changes almost immediately in the QA system and correct any errors. If requests are imported once a week into the planned production system, the developers can consolidate their changes in the QA system before they are imported into the production system.

5.       Define responsibilities for releasing change requests. The Business Process Team Lead should perform all releases of change requests. User authorization and ownership prevents others from releasing change requests for which they are not responsible.

6.       Define quality assurance. If you work with mass transports, all requests released by the developers are imported into production systems.

To prevent unchecked changes from being transported, use the SAP Transport Management System (TMS) Quality Assurance procedure. This procedure ensures that each change request is approved before it is imported into the production system. You should use the procedure even for single transports.

Result

Defined policies and procedures for transporting within the system landscape

·         Use projects to control your transports. If your development projects do not overlap much, you can then use different transport schedules for different projects. If you are working on several projects at the same time, it may be hard to say which project will go live first.

·         Test changes before releasing a change request. Using the client admin special function Copy Transport Request, you can copy the contents of a change request (released or not released) to another client within the same SAP system. You can also unit test the change request in the current client.

·         Plan and coordinate client copies. Client copy within the same system is a common activity in SAP systems. For example, a development system with a sandbox client may be regularly refreshed with a copy of the master configuration client. See the section on client refresh procedures in the IT infrastructure document.

·         Use the transport workflow to enable the system administrator to make single transports into your systems. This method automatically triggers a workflow when you release a change request. The workflow ensures close communication between development and administration.

·         Get to know the TMS and make use of it.