Lifecycle Management Tools

This chapter provides overview information and discusses:

Click to jump to parent topicChange Assistant

The Change Assistant is an administration tool designed to automate the process of installing software patches, updates, and upgrades, reducing the time required for application updates. With Change Assistant, administrators can manage changes to their PeopleSoft Enterprise applications—from the smallest patch to a major update. PeopleSoft Change Assistant uses Customer Connection to retrieve only those patches that are needed for a specific PeopleSoft environment, thereby improving administrator productivity. Change Assistant uses the Environment Management Framework to store, retrieve and distribute system configurations across PeopleSoft implementations.

PeopleSoft Change Assistant helps to assemble and organize all of the steps necessary to complete your upgrade. It runs some of the steps automatically, while others may require you to make changes manually. The Change Assistant provides the relevant documentation for the steps included in your upgrade process.

See Also

Getting Started with PeopleSoft Change Assistant

Click to jump to parent topicChange Impact Analyzer

Change Impact Analyzer is a tool installed separately from PeopleTools that helps you determine the impact of specific changes you plan to make to your application. It's an interactive program where you can see the relationships of PeopleSoft definitions in a hierarchical view. Change Impact Analyzer displays several views of analyses in tabular and text views. It's delivered with a set of rules that are used to determine the relationships between definitions. Rules define the impact or effect on definition(s) when another definition changes. For example, if a database field changes, it would impact the record containing that field. You can add custom rules to the rules files, if needed, to assess the impact of additional relationships.

See Also

Getting Started with Change Impact Analyzer

Click to jump to parent topicSetup Manager

Setup Manager supports application configurations with a step-by-step process for identifying, managing, and executing setup tasks based either on business processes or the PeopleSoft products and features you select. Based on specific configuration templates the PeopleSoft Setup Manager actually generates a setup task list and pages you can use to manage the completion of setup tasks.

Setup Manager reduces the time and cost required to implement your PeopleSoft applications by ensuring the application setup is completed accurately and in the correct sequence, thus eliminating costly rework.

The Setup Manager also provides links to relevant integration points, which include the documentation for and online pages used for managing the data.

See Also

Getting Started with Setup Manager

Click to jump to parent topicApplication Designer

Application Designer is the main application development tool of the Enterprise PeopleTools suite. It offers a rich set of lifecycle management features that you will use frequently when upgrading, applying updates provided by Oracle, or applying customizations to your production database. These features enable you to:

See Also

Getting Started with Application Designer's Lifecycle Management Features

Working with Change Packages

Click to jump to parent topicPeopleSoft Test Framework

PeopleSoft Test Framework (PTF) is a tool that automates various tasks within the PeopleSoft Enterprise application – primarily functional testing. Automating functional testing allows you to execute more tests with greater accuracy during a shorter time window.

PTF works by replicating the actions of a single user executing functional tests against a PeopleSoft browser-based application. Users can capture or “record” manual test procedures and save them within the framework. Later, perhaps after an application upgrade or patch, those tests can be executed against the application to verify whether the application still behaves as expected. This method for capturing and executing tests is often called the “record and playback” approach to automation.

Test assets (tests, test cases, logs, and execution options) are stored in a database as Application Designer objects, which means they can be compared and copied between databases.

PTF includes a number of features that many other commercially-available record-and-playback automation tools lack, including:

See Also

Oracle's PeopleSoft Test Framework Preface