Managing transports into the live environment

[Former Member]

My experience has shown me that many people struggle with transports in the live environment when things get a little complicated and there is a mixture of config and abap and multiple versions of objects due to defects found during QA testing. This blog is in the context of a 3-tier SAP ECC landscape but I guess it applies to any ABAP stack.

For me there is only 1 way of correctly managing transports and I'd like to describe this below hoping to get feedback, confirmation or wait-a-minute! from the community.

I don't use Solution Manager yet - I would like to start doing that soon - please share your experiences if you have any.

So here is what I do:

1) Wait until the QA testing is complete. There is no point in starting to collect transport lists in an offline document or spreadsheet or such.

2) Go into STMS and cut-and-paste the import history out of the Live and the QA systems into 2 worksheets in Excel. Make sure to use the import history, NOT the import queue. The import queue can be manipulated and is not a reliable source of information. Go back all the way to when the QA system was last refreshed from live. (I would expect this to be no more than 6 months ago). Make sure that the order of the QA systems import history is not changed in any way.

3) Split the information in the two worksheets into columns using the standard Excel feature: Data / Text to columns.

3) Do a search and replace on the transport number columns and replace all spaces with nothing. This gets rid of any spaces.

4) In the Live system worksheet, move the transport number column to column A and sort by transport number ascending and date and time descending.

5) In the QA system's worksheet, add two columns using a VLOOKUP of the transport number, to pull in the date and time from the live system's transport history.

6) In the QA system's worksheet, you can now see which transports have gone live and which ones haven't.

7) For the transports that are not live, you can see in which order they were imported into QA.

😎 Now mark the transports that are part of your go live on the QA worksheet. Put an X in a new column perhaps.

9) If amongst your transports for golive, you find transports that have already been moved to the live system, you must ensure there are no dependencies. If there is a dependency, you need to include the related transport in your list.

10) If a transport has been imported into QA more than once, I recommend you import it into Live in exactly the same order and repetitions.

11) If someone argues that their transport should not go live, do not just accept that. If their transport has broken the QA system, you should probably considering refreshing the QA system. If it hasn't broken the QA system, there should be no reason why it will break the Live system.

I also recommend doing this exercise on a regular basis to identify transports that were pushed to QA but not to Live. Those  should either be backed out (by a folllow-on transport that reverses the changes) or moved through to Live.

[Former Member]

Hi Jurgen,

Thanks for the information.Yes it is a common scenario where we are struggling when multiple transports occours,More over the fear of sequencing makes it more complicated in these situations.

Definitely this is a helpful solution.

Regards,

Kannan