#Change Management

IRIS configurations and user accounts contain various data elements that need to be tracked, and many people struggle to copy or sync those system configurations and user accounts between IRIS instances. So how can this process be simplified?

In software engineering, CI/CD or CICD is the set of combined practices of continuous integration (CI) and (more often) continuous delivery or (less often) continuous deployment (CD). Can CI/CD eliminate all our struggles?

Hello fellow developers!

When developing with ObjectScript Package Manager, one crucial thing is the package version, which we place in the module.xml file. When we add changes to the package and are ready to publish a new version of the package in the registry, we also need to increase the version number. This is clear, but it is annoying, and we can often forget to do that.

This small article will help you to automate such a process.

InterSystems technologies are renowned for their high performing databases, which support the systems and operations of many organisations. However a key ingredient to this success is the quality and maintainability of their code.

The quality of code can impact everything from speed and ease of fixing bugs and making enhancements, to the overall performance of your organization and your ability to get ahead in the marketplace.

By ensuring your code is maintainable, you can reduce approximately 75% of the systems life cycle costs*. This is why, at George James Software, the solutions we build are always straightforward and written in high quality code - because we know that this solid foundation can positively impact the rest of your organization.

With a maintainable system you're able to reduce your overall maintenance as any issues that occur are significantly faster to identify and fix. This means you're free to allocate that time and budget to enhancements, enabling you to get the most value out of your applications and ultimately better support your organization.

Keep an eye out for our next few posts about what a maintainable system looks like and the tools that can help you keep your code maintainable, in order to help you to reduce those maintenance costs.

Hi Developers!

Recently we announced two new challenges on Global Masters: 'Bugs Bounty' and 'Pull Requests'.

And we are getting a lot of submits to the challenges which are not the thing we are expecting there. So I hope this post will give some shine to this quest.

'Bugs Bounty'

Ok! What are we expecting from 'Bugs bounty'?

There are a lot of Open Exchange solutions that come with public open-source repositories on Github: project and repo, another project and the repo, another one and its repo, and many more on Open Exchange.

In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

• Git 101
• Git flow (development process)
• GitLab installation
• GitLab Workflow
• Continuous Delivery
• GitLab installation and configuration
• GitLab CI/CD

In the previous article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software. Still, our focus was on the implementation part of software development, but this part presents:

• GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process - from idea to user feedback
• Continuous Delivery - software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time. It aims at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently.

The goal of this article is to give users of InterSystems products background on source control in general, and how it can be used with Atelier, an Eclipse plugin. Specifically, I'll be discussing what to do when all of your developers share a single dev instance of an InterSystems product where they can edit and compile code.

Hi, Community!

What is your favorite issue tracking system for projects with InterSystems Data Platform? What did you use and what are you using now?

In projects with InterSystems Data Platform, I worked with Redmine, JIRA, Trello. A lot of code versioning systems now have this feature too (Gitlab, Github).

Now my favorite for small and medium projects is Github, because it is simple, is very close to code (commit-issue linkage) and it has kanban).

For those who don't have a chance to vote elsewhere today, or for those who want to vote more than once , here's a poll for Ensemble users.

In this series of articles, I'd like to present and discuss several possible approaches toward software development with InterSystems technologies and GitLab. I will cover such topics as:

• Git 101
• Git flow (development process)
• GitLab installation
• GitLab Workflow
• Continuous Delivery
• GitLab installation and configuration
• GitLab CI/CD
• Why containers?
• GitLab CI/CD using containers

In the first article, we covered Git basics, why a high-level understanding of Git concepts is important for modern software development, and how Git can be used to develop software.

In the second article, we covered GitLab Workflow - a complete software life cycle process and Continuous Delivery.

In the third article, we covered GitLab installation and configuration and connecting your environments to GitLab

In the fourth article, we wrote a CD configuration.

In this article, let's talk about containers and how (and why) they can be used.

This is the second part of my long post about package managers in operating systems and language distributions. Now, hopefully, we have managed to convince you that convenient package manager and rich 3^rd party code repository is one key factor in establishing of a vibrant and fast growing ecosystem. (Another possible reason for ecosystem success is the consistent language design, but it will be topic for another day.)

Have you ever thought what could be a reason why some development environment (database, language) would eventually become popular? What part of this popularity could be explain as language quality? What by new and idioms approaches introduced by early language adopters? What is due to healthy ecosystem collaboration? What is due to some marketing genius?