Author: Riley Rafko is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Principal at Slalom.
The context
Recently, a Center of Excellence (CoE) group that I was working with came upon a common, yet anxiety-inducing, issue: a production issue needed to be fixed urgently but many pending changes in the development model weren’t yet tested nor were they ready for synchronization into production.
There are many posts and discussions that reference the process for promoting a “hotfix”. Since this post isn’t about that topic specifically, I will highlight the concepts rather than the details:
- Isolate and sync only the incremental change to the production environment, that which is required to fix the production error via a model reversion to a previous point in time.
- Revert the model to the pre-hotfix point, thereby restoring the new development.
- Reapply the development fix from step one.
The most time-consuming, and potentially error-prone, portion of this process is matching a revision tag with a history ID. The reason for each is as follows:
- Revision tag: used to synchronize only intended development at each step.
- History ID: used for completion of the restore prompt in Anaplan.
The hotfix process requires matching of these two components due to the nature of working with several iterations of time of the same model.
To set yourself up for time savings later, simply add the history ID into the Title or Description in your existing Revision Tag naming conventions.
Include the history ID in each revision tag. History ID is highlighted in the revision tag title in the screenshot above.
The “cost”
To be set up for this, the model history will have to be accessed every time a revision tag is created. It is recommended to copy the most recent history ID to paste into the revision tag name. It will add a marginal amount of time to the creation of each new revision tag.
The payoff
Currently, the hotfix process can be daunting due to the potential of massive history logs. It can involve extracting and converting data then searching/filtering to find the correct model history before the hotfix process can even begin. Instead, when the history IDs are embedded in the revision tag name, CoE users can complete the restoration without referencing the logs (provided that the histories are recorded properly).
