Version control - a business scenario
Gain full control of changes in your scheduling environment.
Version control is most often used to track and control changes to software source code. However, to meet change management and auditing requirements, version control must also be applied to the scheduling objects, like jobs and job streams, associated to a certain application.
HCL Workload Automation is a modern, advanced workload automation solution supporting Version Control. HCL Workload Automation maintains all versions of your scheduling objects in the database, and you can easily access them from the Dynamic Workload Console. For each scheduling object, you can view the history of changes, discover which user made a specific change, the time stamp of the change, and the reason for the change. Then, you can compare two different versions in a comparison viewer and restore a previous version.
Business scenario
Rob works as an application developer in a large healthcare company. Marnie works as a scheduler in the same company. Rob is working on the new release of an application for smart diagnostics. He prepares the full set of scheduling objects, jobs and job streams, associated to the application, and validates them in the test environment. The deadline has arrived, Rob is confident that the new release can be deployed in the production environment. He just makes a last minute change to the input file path for a java class in the DefineDiagnostics job. Time is running out and Rob leaves the office without verifying his last change.
The day after, Marnie, the scheduler, opens the Monitor Workload view and checks the job results for the daily plan. She is surprised to find out that the healthcare application job stream is blocked. The DefineDiagnostics job that has always completed successfully, today has ended abnormally. From the Workload Designer user interface, Marnie opens the failing job definition in edit mode. On the Versions page, she looks at the history of changes and realizes that Rob made a last minute change the day before.
Marnie can compare the failing job definition with the previous one, with no manual effort. By opening the comparison viewer and by looking at the differences between the two versions, she can determine the error introduced by Rob: a wrong file path. Marnie decides to restore the previous version of the job definition. From the Monitor Workload page, she reruns the failing job. This time, the healthcare application job stream completes successfully.
By using the version control feature, Marnie can quickly and easily solve a problem that otherwise would have compromised the release of the application into production. Version control enables audit readiness, reporting, collaboration, and change management within your company: all challenges that you must overcome in today´s business world.
