As most of you know we've announced the new code exchange platform for SDN at TechEd in Vienna this year. A lot of things happened before and after that announcement. Therefore I'd like to take the opportunity to share with you some outcomes from the extended code exchange product team that works on the definition and implementation of this platform.
The extended code exchange product team
The team consists of the SAP internal code exchange product team and the SAP Mentors. SAP decided to move the mentors closer to the planning and decision process by inviting them into the extended product team. As a result SAP is currently co-developing the new co-development platform together with the SAP Mentors.
Identifying and prioritizing requirements
During the last meetings of the extended product team we've talked about the prioritization of requirements that we've collected in several discussions with the mentors and other SDN community members. We've bundled these requirements to specific packages and let the mentors vote about what they think are those requirements with the highest priority.
These were the identified top three requirements:
- Support of ABAP development
- Good issue tracking system
- Good team management & permissions functionality
After that we started drilling down the requirements into more detailed and technical requirements. Based on the importance of the requirements we started with the ABAP support.
ABAP support
We presented the SAP Mentors the possible scenarios we see with regards to the technical implementation of an ABAP support on code exchange.
The range of the scenarios went from a lean solution using ABAP export mechanisms and the existing integration with the code repository until a hosted ABAP environment for ABAP projects.
During the discussions we talked a lot about the pros and cons of each of the possible scenarios and how the best approach for an ABAP collaboration project should look like on the code exchange platform. At the end the preferred scenario was the usage of an ABAP import/export together with the code repository of the project on code exchange.
With this approach an ABAP project will not be handled much different than e.g. a Java project on code exchange.
As a next step we will now look into the technical details for an implementation supporting the preferred ABAP scenario as good as possible.
Next steps
We will continue with the regular meetings of the extended code exchange product team and will go through the identified requirements list one-by-one. Once the ABAP support requirements are defined we'll tackle the requirements for issue tracking and the team management in the same manner.
At the end we hope that once we switch from the closed beta to an open beta system, it will be already a perfectly fitting suit for the requirements of the SDN community.
More information
- Use our code exchange landing page on SDN to get up-to-date information
- For any questions you can look into our FAQ page or use the SCN Downloads and Widgets Support
- For ad-hoc infos you can follow the code exchange Twitter account
Last but not least I'd like to thank the SAP Mentors for supporting us with their feedback and ideas. We are very happy and proud to work together with you on building up this platform.
@SAP Mentors: please feel free to comment on this blog and maybe to comment about your experience with the extended code exchange product team.
Rui
PS: For those of you who'd like to have a first look into the platform, I've created two video podcasts (SDN code exchange video part 1: Overview, SDN code exchange video part 2: Hands on code).