TD/OMS Fusion Pro - Source Compare and Merge

When customers start to maintain their own version of the ERP system it slowly drifts away from the maintained version of the supplier. In many cases, retrofitting custom changes back into the supplier version proofed to be a labor intensive process which combined with the lack of commonly available testing tools, still a problem in 2015, and therefore the need to perform laborious manual integration testing led to the adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. That’s how vendor software versions were put on shelf and how companies usually stopped upgrading their applications with changes from the supplier. When the need to move to a new version of the supplier arises (for example when the upgrade would bring significant benefits to company operations), the customers faces a major challenge. TD/OMS Fusion Pro can overcome these challenges.

Comparing libraries of code

The Remain Software solution, TD/OMS Fusion Pro (Source Change Control), which is part of the TD/OMS Application Lifecycle Management framework, allows comparison of complete libraries of sources. The process is divided in two steps. After isolating user and/or supplier changes from the base the user gets a clear vision on the differences. From this point on a merge between original and changed source can be done. The first annotated merged version is a source which can be compiled but it has all the details of the merge in it so that the developer can see exactly what happened, and revert or replace older lines. The source can also be left annotated. If a problem in test or production is found, the annotations can help developers to find the cause of the error. Finally a command is run to clean the annotations, leaving the user with the final source. After the merge, users can test its correctness by compiling the sources which will confirm if the merge was a success from a technical point of view and if the application runs correctly.

Fast, effortless, stable and successful application upgrade

If the modified application including retrofitted changes runs in the bigger environment, TD/OMS and its graphical impact analysis module can show how the different components in the system interact; what files are read by which programs, or what “foreign” logicals are created over suppliers physical. Therefore, TD/OMS Fusion Pro as a part of TD/OMS allows the user to conduct a fast, effortless, stable and successful upgrade of the application, that will work properly in the entire system.

Not alone the automatic retrofitting of vendor changes can be done with Fusion Pro, also the use case where developers work on different versions based on the same ancestor, so called “dual maintenance” or “branches”’

TD/OMS Fusion Pro can be used as a standalone source compare and merge product or as a part of Remain’s IBM i Application Lifecycle Management framework, TD/OMS.