Sablime ® Configuration Management System

This is the Sablime home page. It has access to all the functionality of the Sablime Configuration Management System.

Before we get going, though, let’s have a short update of what Sablime is all about. Sablime is a Software Configuration Management System. Sablime uses documents called MRs (Modification Requests) to track all proposed and actual changes to a software system. The MRs are linked to the underlying Version Control system, so that all changes to artifacts (usually software source files) have MR authorization. Thus all changes are traceable to their initiating request. Sablime manages the changes made by the MRs, and manages the advancement of the MRs from creation through development, testing, and approval. The animation on the following pages gives a graphical representation of the MR “lifecycle”.

The Sablime MR takes the idea from concept to customer. delivery concept analysis implementation verification assign accept create approve ST pass IT pass submit Simplified Sablime MR Lifecycle A little bit of marketing talk here. Sorry. The next few slides highlight some parts of the MR process.

create accept assign accept create approve ST pass IT pass submit Simplified Sablime MR Lifecycle kill study propose MRs get created by engineers, managers, or customers. If it isn’t obvious what to do with the MR, you might need to study it. Or you might conclude it was a bad idea, and kill it.

assignsubmit assign accept create approve ST pass IT pass submit Simplified Sablime MR Lifecycle edit getput This is the developer’s world. Once an MR is assigned, the developer can extract files from the database and make changes. Eventually, the developer finishes changing files with the MR, and presumably does some Unit testing, and then submits the MR.

assign accept create approve ST pass IT pass submit Simplified Sablime MR Lifecycle submit approve pre-IT pass IT pass pre-ST pass ST pass pre-approve Once an MR is submitted, it can proceed through any of 5 test states, where testers determine whether the change was correctly implemented. If an MR fails testing, it can be rejected to an earlier state or all the way back to assigned, where the developer then makes further changes.

Now, returning to the actual Sablime screen, we’ll show how some of these things are done. And show some other interesting features of Sablime.

As you move your mouse into a particular segment of the lifecycle arc, the segment becomes highlighted, and it shows the segment name. The boxes along the arc (“create”, “accept”, etc.) are some of the Sablime commands.

If you move your mouse further out in the segment, other Sablime commands appear - commands that work with MRs in that part of the lifecycle. All of these are really links to the command pages. For example, then, lets click on “create”.

“Click”

This shows what a Sablime command screen looks like. If you wanted to create a new MR, you’d fill out the form and click the “Create” button. By the way, the, field labels and contents are customizable

Another feature of the Sablime home screen: If you move your mouse over the highlighted segment’s name, it changes to “MyMRs”

“Click” Clicking on “My MRs” will give you a list of your MRs. The different segments generate different lists. Here, we’ll get a list of development MRs.

Here, you see the MRs assigned to you. You can click on an MR name to begin working with that MR. “Click”

This is the “MR Details” page for the MR we clicked. We can click on the “files” tab to see what has already been done with this MR. “Click”

Here, we see that this MR has already changed a couple files. We could click on “Browse Files” to select other files to change with this MR… Or on “Add New Source” if we wanted to add a new file to the Sablime system… Or “Add File to Generic” to bring a file from forward from an older release into this one.

Instead of doing any of those things, let’s make some further changes to “things.c”. We click on the “Action” menu… “Click”

… and select “Edget this file…” “Click”

On the “Edget” screen, select or enter a directory to place the file into… Then click “Edget” to check out the file. “Click”

edget Completed Successfully /opt/sablime/bin/interix/edget dir=“/Users/priffle/Documents” mr=“smp850007” g=“smp1.0” rm=“n” srf=“things.c” prompt=n The file is now available for editing on your local machine.

You don’t use Sablime to make the actual file changes. Here, we’ve used “Vim” (a nice little text editor available on nearly all platforms) to add a line to the “things.c” file.

To check the file back in, you can return to the “edget” screen and select “Edput this file” from the “Next Operation” menu… … or you could return to the “files” tab of the “MR Details” page, and select “Edput this file…” … or you can even return to the Sablime home screen and select “edput” from there. In any case, you will arrive next at the edput screen…

… and then press “Edput” As with “edget”, you use the Browse button to locate your changed copy of the file… “Click”

Back on the MR Details page, we can now see that there are two changes (deltas) to the “things.c” file. We can view the “History” of the file… “Click”

The file History page shows each delta that has been made against this file (by any MR). You can select any two deltas, and ask for the Difference. Here, we’ll select the two most recent versions, and show the Difference between them. “Click”

> 10 smp smp /* Adding a comment here for no particular reason */ 12 smp … and, sure enough, there’s the change we made to the file. It’s marked with the MR number and line number.

At this point, if we were done changing files with smp850007, we might return to the MR Details page and “submit” the MR. As with edput, there are multiple ways to get to the submit command. This isn’t intended to confuse people, but to acknowledge that users go about things differently. “Click”

If at any time, you aren’t sure what goes in a particular field, or - for example - whether there’s a default value, you can click on a field label to get help… Resolution Code: Resolution Code - as proposed, or other Defaults to “as proposed” Categorizes the resolution. The entries in this menu are often customized to provide finer categorization. “Click”

If you need general or more thorough help with the command, you can click on the Help Button “?”, and Sablime will display the Usage Guide “Click”

This will come up in your PDF file viewer (usually Adobe Reader or an Adobe Reader plugin to your browser) You can click on the many links to follow your own chain of information; or on the page titles in the Index.

Sablime also gives you access to your data through the Microsoft Excel Interface. Here, you can click on an MR name and the interface will display the MR details page for that MR...or you can click on a developer or tester’s name and it will open your program to send to that person about that MR When you click on “Fetch Updates”, the interface contacts the Sablime database and updates your spreadsheet with any new data. The new data will be highlighted with red boxes, so you can see what’s changed. You can step through these and “Accept” them one at a time, or all at once.

The Excel interface also offers charts to help you visualize your status and progress over time.

Sablime also gives you a plugin so you can use the Eclipse IDE for your software development. Eclipse gives you the development environment, supported by Sablime’s version control and MR management.

We hope that this presentation helped to show you about Sablime, a powerful, comprehensive, and easy to use Software Configuration Management System. We’ll leave you with a few more words of Marketing: Sablime’s tightly integrated change control maintains linkage and traceability between the changes and the reason for the changes. The most elaborate, expensive, exhaustive change control system is of little value if you don’t know WHY files are changing. The MR is the basic unit of feature implementation, building, testing, delivery. Because you don’t deliver files to a customer, you deliver features. The MR set, then, defines the feature set for a release. Because real Configuration Management isn’t about keeping track of changes to files. It’s about keeping track of changes to the system. Thanks for your attention! Restart in a few seconds. Sablime® is a registered trademarks of Alcatel-Lucent. Contents copyright© 2007, Alcatel-Lucent.