BY/JDA WMS — 1-Click Scripts to create a Developer’s Personalized Environment
For an organization using BY (formerly JDA) WMS Application, environment cloning is an important aspect and at times, a grueling one. Generally, if they have developers in-house, they need to have at least the following instances.
- Production
- Integrated Test (IT)
- Unit Test (UT)
- Development (DEV)
From an architectural standpoint, IT always has to be the closest to Production and most frequently refreshed (at least 3–4 times a year) to populate the instance with Production data to be able to investigate issues in a lower environment to avoid any downtime on a live system.
On the other hand, as testing is done a lot of DEV and UT systems, end up getting inconsistent workflows due to development and on-going testing and integration between different host systems — so they also need to be refreshed.
An organization that doesn’t have a systematic approach to cloning an environment often runs into issues, even with the ones that do, still, end up with issues either because a team missed a step or some configuration was not completed or could be a number of issues. So why not automate it?
BY WMS has two components to it (we will leave Portal out in this scenario):
- Application Server
- Database
Each of these components can easily be scripted to automate the process of cloning an environment, but still, organizations struggle to do it. At Smart IS, we have a personalized development instance for each developer. We created scripts that allow us to replicate environments via a 1-Click solution and a replicated environment exclusive for a developer is created within seconds (literally seconds).
Having the ability to version control source code and other necessary files allows an organization to enable its developers to do UT and IT of their code in this new development model. Not only does this increase productivity for an individual developer, but also enables a team to reduce bottleneck due to the increased time for mbuild or an instance stop/start to complete for newer versions of JDA WMS. Besides, multiple developers cannot always work on different modules within the same environment because changes in MOCA commands or data can cause their development/testing efforts to increase. So, why not invest in having an exclusive environment for a developer, that is version controlled?
