I’ve been working on our company’s Systems Dev team for about 6 years. We have been building this team from the ground up since then. I now lead the team but we are facing the good problem that we are growing but the downside is that it is starting to get to a point where we can’t keep up with each others customization changes through our IT help desk tool. It doesn’t have a good knowledge base capability. I have discussed using GitLab with one of my programmers but he doesn’t think we would get much value out of it and that we don’t have a great way of connecting it directly to EPICOR.
My main question is what do others use for a Dev Management tool?
I haven’t really heard of one that specifically is friendly with EPICOR. We are on Kinetic and On-Prem if that makes a difference. We are a pretty strong team when it comes to programming and integration as well so certainly not below making some sort of integration if needed.
I’m the only one doing customization in our company, so this is probably not directly helpful for larger groups. But maybe it helps flesh out the various aspects of this problem.
Customizations (reports, dashboards, layers, etc. are documented in tables embedded in a shared Google doc. The tables have fields, such as
Purpose
Special data requirements (“This report depends on table.customfieldname…”).
Kinetic UI (or not)? status
Menu entries for the app
RDL
RDD
BAQs
Kinetic layers
Solution name
Then a subtable with revision history.
Solutions
I try to group all the elements of one “app” together. So a custom dashboard will have a menu entry, BAQ(s), Kinetic app, layers, etc.
Solutions are saved to a shared Google folder.
My ‘knowledgebase’ is another shared doc, where I store code samples; things I know I’ll forget in a week, but it will take me days to find again if I don’t write it down, conceptual topics that might help the next person, etc. Chapters are e.g., BAQs, BPMs, Dashboards, Application Studio, Functions, UD columns. etc.
For a team, Confluence might make sense.
I also kind of have to stick with ‘company IT’ resources. So I haven’t tried github nor does it seem like I’d benefit from it.
But it is a big problem. I feel like I’m using 1990’s tools to solve 21st century problems. I can imagine all the issues really multiply with a larger team.
Sadly unlike Classic there is no real starter place to put a comment block. You could put it on the first control of the main form.
My prior workplace would have shared documents one for BPMS, one for customizations, one for reports etc with the latest version and who was working on it.
We also had a place to put the latest versions of the exports and an archive for past versions
I’m the only Epicor dev here at the moment but am considering doing that just to keep things more organized.
As Jose mentioned, I have an Epicor Idea that’s been out there for…a while.
There’s been some features here and there. Most recently, Application Studio has internal commits. But there’s nothing like keeping source code in GitHub and using deployment pipelines, etc. Epicor is listening. It’s a big project and we just have to break it down into bite-size pieces.
I’m glad you’ve been consistent with that ask and I like hearing about it/reading about it across any of these threads where it’s mentioned. I think quickly to the recent code changes that were done to people’s code and I think this tooling would help so much.
