Hi Appioans,
I work on a large Appian-based system with several developers (~14) who at any given time can be touching/changing multiple objects. We have developed an Agile way of working around Appian that has proved pretty successful up to now. We have ceremonies in place to plan small, encapsulated changes on JIRA tickets. The developers wrap all the objects required for their fix/change/enhancement in an application (which maps to the JIRA ticket) and go to great lengths to list every object that they change onto the JIRA tickets as they go. Before deployments into other environments two or three of our team spend a great deal of time and effort making sure that tickets haven't become entangled by shared objects. This becomes especially difficult if things get moved back to DEV from UAT. We have now reached a point where there is just so much change happening this is becoming unmanageable.
In 2021 what is the best approach for managing change and versioning in Appian? I'd like to hear some real-world examples of managing big Appian projects.
From the playbook I can see: https://community.appian.com/w/the-appian-playbook/198/deployment-automation Has anyone had any success in implementing this?
My objective is to get Appian to behave a bit more like a classical web-development project where developers have a local branch they can develop to and then deployments to UAT could be built on a ticket by ticket basis, importing only the changes that were made on tha ticket.
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We hit this problem internally when we had multiple pods/teams working on different apps with shared objects (after all, are you really using Appian well if you aren't leveraging shared components?!). We ended up building an Appian DevOps solution that handles the "traditional" idea of branches to fix that "unmanageable changes" problem. Its backed by Jenkins, the ADS, and version control (SVN/git) but abstracts them out for the developer and deploy master to make it far easier than using those tools directly. Take a look for more info! https://community.appian.com/b/appmarket/posts/map---macedon-application-pipeline