Application definition in the pipeline

Suppose Pega Platform™ developers use agile practices to create applications and commit the changes into branches in a shared development environment. In that case, automated testing can provide rapid feedback to developers to improve the application.

Follow these best practices to optimize the development and deployment process, and enable agility in releasing application versions faster and reliably:

Modularized application - Smaller applications move through the pipeline faster and are easier to develop, test, and maintain. Use multiple built-on applications to develop and process smaller component applications. 

Maintain a single source of truth - Create a Pega Platform instance as a source environment that acts as a single source of truth for the application. Doing so introduces stability into the developer environment and ensures that a problem in one developer environment does not affect other environments.

Adopt branch-based development - Developers can work in a shared development environment or local environments. Content in branches migrates from development environments to merge into the source environment.

Mandate unit tests - Create and automate effective unit tests.

Secure your work - Ensure that the work on a ruleset is reviewed and the changes are validated. Lock every complete and validated ruleset. Regularly synchronize the development environments with the source environment.

Before you migrate your application, ensure that both the environment and the application have addressed any guardrail warnings. As a best practice, modularize the application as smaller components and use dependencies as built-on applications. These built-on applications must have their release pipelines so that the application is released independently.

Manage your applications independently to achieve agility in application delivery. To move the applications quickly through the pipeline, modularize the applications.

Application details specify the application that a pipeline can progress through during the release process.

The following are the application details:

• Application name: Provide the name of the application for which a pipeline is configured, as the pipeline can manage a single application.
• Application version: Specify the application version for which a pipeline is configured. When multiple versions of an application are present, the pipeline manages the application for the specified version. Create a pipeline for each active version of the application.
• Access group: Specify the access group that has access to perform the tasks configured in the pipeline. The access group must be present on all candidate systems and have at least the sysadmin4 role.
• Product rule: Specify the product rule that defines the contents of the application. A product rule packages the entire application so that the artifact generated from the product rule is used to recreate the same application instance on every target instance. The product rule is only required if the pipeline generates an artifact.
• Product rule version: Specify the product rule version only if the pipeline generates an artifact.

A pipeline can also manage test application details with the attributes specified above through the Release process.

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