Yesterday I mentioned SAS platform administrators and how their work and their value can be overlooked. My post related to an article on the SAS Users Groups blog. Last week I saw another SAS Users Groups blog entry about something else that is often overlooked: Release Management.
The blog post was a nod to the best contributed paper in the Systems Administration and Architecture stream: SAS Release Management and Version Control by John Heaton (also winner of best contributed paper in the Data Management stream as I mentioned on Friday).
At the risk of turning this week's sequence of blogs into a celebration of all-things-overlooked, I thought it worth highlighting John's paper because management of releases and versioning does indeed tend to get lost in the excitement and frenzied activity associated with application upgrades. Steve O'Donoghue and I were invited to present a related paper at SAS Global Forum 2009 entitled Configuration Management for SAS Software Projects so it's clear that the topic is one in which I hold a special interest.
John describes release management as "the process of managing multiple different software releases between environments in a
controlled, auditable and repeatable process" and his paper looks at the capabilities of the SAS 9.3 toolset to build an effective Release Management process to support the migration and maintenance of SAS code throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
John makes specific references to Subversion (SVN) as a tool for storing current and previous versions of code. SAS tools don't explicitly support SVN (or any of its competitors) so John describes his approach to marrying SAS and SVN.
Having made introductions to SVN, John continues by covering import and export of metadata-resident objects such as DI Studio jobs. DI Studio is the focus of John's paper. He doesn't forget to include an approach for deploying unplanned software patches.
John's paper is very technical in nature, but be sure to understand the over-riding strategies that are implicit in what he says. Ignoring or overlooking release and version control is perilous. If you're working in a regulated industry then your regulators are likely to suggest that you are not in control of your software development process. Without clear, robust release and version control you risk expensive mistakes during or after software upgrades.