14 Implementation Process

This release of RSB defines the full life cycle of the RSB software product. The RSB life cycle and phases are described in detail in the software lifecycle management section of this document. For every life cycle phases and task that RSB defines it provides corresponding tools and utilities to manage and operate on those phases.

There are several prerequisite steps that should be followed to have a successful RSB installation and deployment.

• Understand the RSB Core Concepts.

• Understand the deployment options.

• Understand the RSB life cycle.

• Understand the physical and logical requirements and limitations of the RSB Components.

• Understand the RSB Operational considerations.

The process of implementation should follow these general steps:

• Work with the teams at your organization dedicated to Oracle Retail to coordinate plans for the number and type of environments needed (for example, Dev, Integration, Production).

• Each type of environment needs to be sized, deployed, and managed in conjunction with the implementation of the Oracle Retail applications.

  • It is critical to understand the volume requirements of the production system so that the appropriate decisions can be made about the deployment option and the physical location and sizing.

• All deployments have integration to existing retailer systems. It is critical to understand the position of the RSB as it fits into the overall integration architecture and that the current operations and architecture team understand the RSB and its capabilities.

• Select a deployment option (cluster or non-cluster).

  • This may be mixed depending on the phases of deployment. Development and test may be non-clustered and production clustered.

  • Understand the operational complexities of each and plan for the staffing.

  • Work with the application server administration teams to determine the physical and logical placement of the RSB components.

  • Work with the system administrators to select the central RSB management location, rsb-home.

• The installation of the RSB has many prerequisites and dependencies that require the understanding, support and effort of database administrators, system administrators, application server administrators, and your organization's Oracle Retail application teams. It is a critical role of the RSB system administrator to work with each team, regardless of the site organization structure. See the Oracle Retail Service Backbone Installation Guide.

• Create operational plans for the RSB life cycle.

• Create plans for environment monitoring and maintenance.

• Plan for performance test. The RSB supplies tools to aid in the testing, but it is a difficult task that involves the database administrators, system administrators, application server administrators, and the Oracle Retail application teams.

Verification and Validation

Verification is the process of reviewing, inspecting, testing, and documenting that the product behaves in a manner as defined by the product requirement specification. Validation on the other hand is the process of making sure that the product's runtime behavior meets the retailer's needs and requirements. RSB provides tools and utilities to verify that a RIB installation is configured correctly and works properly when service invocations occur in your enterprise. RSB also provides tools to test integration infrastructure standalone, independent of any Oracle Retail applications.

Implementation Environment Verification

After the deployment, the implementation can be verified using RIC. RIC shows a variety of information including the diagrammatic representation of integration flows, deployment topology, server details, WSDL URLs. In addition to this, it supports verification of services by calling the ping operation. It can also test the database connectivity.

Testing the Web service calls using ping in RIC is an almost complete validation of your implementation. The ping call goes through the decorator to the edge app service and returns. Hence, if ping works, generally the implementation is correctly configured. However, ping test will not detect issues with payload version differences, certificates and keystores in the consumer side and so on.