Managing Application Development in PEGA #PART2

Here, we are going to discuss the discuss the best practices for Agile, CI and CD. Please check the previous part to get more information on Agile workbench.

Pega Platform includes best practices for agile development, including:

• Real-time updates: frequent development iterations that are small in scope
• Testing: continuous application validation to identify and address issues early
• Branches: concurrent team development environment to maximize productivity

Agile best practice examples by Pega Express phase include:

• Discover: Define business outcomes and create a Day 1 Go-Live plan
• Prepare: Host a design sprint with end users to build a working prototype
• Build: Build your application based on user stories in the backlog
• Adopt: Once your application goes live, conduct a release retrospective

During continuous integration, maintain these best practices:

• Test early and often: for example, identify issues early by running Pega unit tests and critical integration tests before packaging the application. If tests fail, stop the release pipeline until the issue is fixed.
• Automate: for example, trigger merges and builds by using the Deployment Manager.
• Update rules: for example, keep the product rule, Rule-Admin-Product, referenced in an application pipeline, up-to-date.
• Maintain version history: publish the exported application archives into a repository to maintain a version history of deployable applications.

Follow these continuous delivery best practices to ensure application quality:

• Create test environments: Use Docker or a similar tool to create test environments for user acceptance tests (UAT) and exploratory tests.
• Conduct regression tests: Create a wide variety of regression tests through the user interface and the service layer.
• Use version control: Define target ruleset versions for production deployment.
• Employ a rollback strategy: If a test fails, roll back the latest import.
• Document: If all the tests pass, annotate the application package to indicate that it is ready to be deployed. Deployment can be performed manually or automatically.