Keeping development projects running smoothly starts with being able to see what is going on. If you’ve got lots of developers involved in every stage of your app build then things can quickly get complicated – which is when great oversight really starts to shine.
As you grow, you’re going to need more developers working on more apps, and so the complexity of your day-to-day Qlik development operation will increase rapidly. You need to be ready for this so that you know precisely what your people are doing.
Trouble Tracking?
Many companies these days outsource some, if not all, of their development. This is a great way to source talent as and when you need it; but it does come with some drawbacks. Being able to manage developers from across the world and get them to collaborate effectively with one another is a challenge you might be familiar with. Typically, companies don’t have a single solution to this problem.
While development is often outsourced, deployment is almost always kept in-house because businesses want to retain control of the apps they deliver. Within that motivation to retain control is the key factor of security. Giving external developers access to a deployment environment is very risky – and is usually avoided at all costs.
Managing work comes down to picking an appropriate app (such as Jira) that helps you to control all active tasks with a traceable ticketing system. But the problem is, beyond the top-level view the tickets show you, you don’t really know what anyone is working on within them. You can’t rely on Excel spreadsheets for tracking, because manually managing what everyone – in both your internal and external teams – is doing takes a huge amount of time and is prone to error.
So what’s the answer?
Perfect Vision
In short, you need a solution that gives you visibility of everything your developers are doing. PlatformManager is built from the ground up to give you this power and negates any room for errors in collaborative ways of working.
With PlatformManager you can see which apps are currently being developed, what’s being tested, and which version is currently in production. It gives a perfect overview of each version of every app on every server that you have. This increases your team’s working speed and ensures that the work people are doing isn’t wasted – you don’t want people working on older versions by mistake.
On top of the visibility provided by PlatformManager, the solution also offers a release management solution, where you can put all of your releases in a container. You can test the package of files in that container as one so you know everything that needs to work together does work together. Then, you simply move the entire container to the production server and if there is an issue, just revert the container to the old version. This means the end-user always has consistent set of apps to work with.
It also shows dependencies so that you can see the impact of changes on both development and deployment. For instance, if you augment an app you might need to adjust data connections when moving the app to a different server. PlatformManager shows you all of these connections and enables you to change them during promotion so you never have to waste time chasing down issues.
Need a better view of your Qlik development? PlatformManager is here to help.