Development environment?

[Mike Strout]

I am trying to get a handle on best practices for Cloverleaf environments and would like some feedback on how organizations have their enterprises setup. Specifically, do you have a separate development environment, does each interface programmer have a local install they develop in, or does everything happen in an environment one step away from prod, like a test environment.

My goal is to organize our servers/environments so they will work well for remote developers. I am also looking at implementing a version control tool and documentation methodology that helps us manage all our assets.

I realize this is a pretty big topic and it may take too long to type up. If any of you gurus are willing, I would love to chat by phone. Just send me an email if you would be willing to offer some suggestions. (mike.strout@tmfhc.org)

Topic

[James Cobane]

Hi Mike,

Here at Henry Ford Health, we have 3 environments – Development, Test, and Production, each in their own LPAR with Dev/Test on one physical box and PRD on a different physical box.  We are configured for fail-over so that Prod fails over to the Dev/Test box and visa-versa.  The intent was to use the development environment for the initial development/coding, then when your interface is ready to be tested with the external system it gets deployed in the Test environment and integrated testing takes place in Test; any interfaces to external test systems reside in the Test environment.  Once the interfaces are fully tested, they are implemented into the Production environment.

With that said, the reality is that most of the development is done in the Test environment anyway; it is typically a short cycle between initial development/testing to actually beginning to test with the external system.

Hope that helps.

Jim Cobane

Henry Ford Health

[Mike Strout]

Thanks for your thoughts Jim.

I have just been browsing the forum looking at posts about source control and moving changes between environments. As best I can tell, there really isn’t a standard way to do any of it. Most of the solutions are great, but some seem unnecessarily complicated. Perhaps it is just because I have such a small environment. We have 5 sites, with 30 processed spread across them and about 120 threads. If we had hundreds of sites and a dozen developers, it would be a totally different world.

Mike

[Kevin Crist]

We have a smaller site and only have one server but we mirror all our prod sites with test sites. So our charges site is prod900 we have a test900 with a different set of ports. We do our work in the test side before moving to prod. We do have our own personal site to play around in but don’t use to often. We used to document what we did but the changes we get asked to do on a daily basis basically doesnt leave any time for us to document unless it’s something major. But there is only me doing this so there isnt much of a chance of others stepping on toes.

[Author]

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