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GxTend in Detail: Versioning and Traceability

How many times do we desperately search for the last changes made? What worked well stopped doing it and there are complaints because of a yet unidentified change. How many hours of "rework", how much time and money does this require?

Versioning and Traceability is the module of GxTend , the full-web tool suite to manage a software development project, that enables a vision of project through time.

Now with GxTend it is possible to access the whole "history" of all the elements of our application, all the time.


GxTend goes along with the products evolution, recording all the modified elements in its internal repository. It does not just consider the GeneXus "exportable objects" but also external knowledge, table structures and their respective indexes as well as the navigation of each of the versioned objects.

As the product evolves, GxTend captures in its data base the evolution of the relevant entities and the relation between those entities (such as cross referencing). It is possible to search among the versioned objects, then select and compare the changes made.

The figure shows the evolution of the VprosTra table, where the current version is highlighted and we can see that since its creation it has suffered five changes. Each of the structures can be seen and the changes compared, as it was specified in the article about Productivity Tools.

Revisions

It is difficult to talk about versioning and not include the Revisions concept.

GxTend enables taking a snapshot of the current versions at a given moment, generating the revision concept. A revision can be supplemented with information that explains the meaning of that "snapshot" for the organization.

Each revision shows our application's situation at a given time.

We can generate the revision in an interactive manner, such as associating it to a delivery to the client or putting parameters for its execution by calendar, which is recorded as an automatic revision.

When displaying revisions, GxTend highlights the changes in the data base structures. As we observe in the following figure, GxTend groups by color those revisions that correspond to the same data base structure.

We then see how the GxTend repository contains all the information of the evolution of our application and gives us the right tools to process it with flexibility.

The user can make searches, select, compare the selected revisions while identifying the changes through time. You can select a particular revision and browse through the project status at a given time.

As we mentioned earlier, you can navigate through the time evolution of any of our applications entities, in a Kb, among different Kbs or even among different clients, projects or modules.

And the traceability?

Both the Versioning and the Traceability are important aspects in any software development. It is so much so that they are required in order to obtain quality certifications.

GxTend enables recording the reason for the evolution of an element and/or any other information that you want to associate to the change.

One example can be the management of the incidence that caused a new version of an entity, be it because a new requirement or because the correction introduced at an incident.

The versioning and traceability information can be employed to build the metrics that interest the organization, considering the vision of the projects various actors.

From its graphic, full web interface, GxTend enables accessing the traceability information. For example for the objects of a GeneXus Kb, it is possible to define an "Object ChangeLog"-type entry, so that in each evolution of the object we can have the following information:

Diff. between version n and version n-1 of the object. User who made the modification. Explanation of the modification.

Whats next?

Some uses of the Versioning and Traceability module of GxTend were shown. Together with the Productivity Tools they complete the projects vision, both through time and through the KBs. In the next issue we will present the Concurrent Control module, which offers options for various developers to work in a controlled manner on the consolidated KBs, organizing the work with agility and preventing time waste.

 

 

Related
GxTend: Software Configuration Management
Change Management in GeneXus Projects
GxTend in Depth: Productivity Tools
GxTend present at SODEC Expo's 15th edition in Tokyo