Feature Delivery

The feature serves the purpose to establish the cloud mindset by making the move to the continuous feature delivery. Continuous feature delivery shifts the focus on delivering new functionality incrementally.

Feature workflow

A Feature follows an easy workflow with the following statuses:

Not Planned: To indicate that a Feature is postponed.
In Specification: Technical specification of a Feature to be done.
In Implementation: Implementing the Feature covers recording of changes (assign transports) and deploying changes to the test stage.
Ready for Deployment: Indicates that the changes were successfully tested and are ready for production deployment.
Deployed: Confirming the deployment of the changes to production.

The following table shows you which activities related to the transport section are available in the respective feature statuses:

Status	Assign	Deploy
Not Planned	No	No
In Specification	Yes	No
In Implementation	Yes	Yes
Ready for Deployment	Yes	Yes
Deployed	No	No

Feature deployment

Deploying features to test systems ensures that new features as well as needed changes can be tested properly before the changes are propagated to the production systems. Eventually features are deployed to the production systems based on the feature status "Ready for Deployment".

The following activities can be performed to prepare yourself for the feature delivery:

Assign modifiable or released transports to a feature once
Un-assign and re-assign transports
Refresh the transport list to get the current status
Deploy the transports in the release order of the subset assigned to the Feature

It is always ensured that transports are deployed to the test system before all transports assigned to a feature can be deployed to the production system. Prior to the deployment of a Feature to production the approval for deployment needs to be given by the change & release manager (at the moment project lead or project admin).

Deployment of features

Deployment of features can be triggered via the "Deploy" button in the transport section.

In the transport section you can easily scan for the transports to be deployed within the feature. Target tenants to be delivered next are shown in dark grey color.

In this example the released transports O11K900079 and O11K900332 will be deployed to the target tenants.

By clicking the "Deploy" button all transports assigned to the feature will be checked for their status. After confirming the upcoming pop-up via "Deploy" the appropriate transports will be scheduled for deployment.

In this example only the transports in status "Released" will be deployed to the target tenants. Indicator here is the mentioned dark grey color in contrast to the light grey color of the target tenants for the transports still in status "Modifiable".

Safeguard deployment to production

To ensure that a production system can only be delivered with a new feature in status "Ready for Deployment" you must assign the production system to the product role "Production" in the Project Landscape app.

In the Project Landscape app you must add a production system, e.g. for the Service Type SAP S/4HANA. In this example we are talking about S4H.803 as production system.

Outcome: Deployment in status "In Implementation" to system S4H~803 is not possible.

You have to switch to status "Ready for Deployment" first.