How Application Lifecycle Management supports the development lifecycle

Application Lifecycle Management enables you to separate duties through separate workspaces, use revision tags to capture the latest state of a development, and use production lists to separate production data from structural information. You can also use model modes to protect production models from unauthorised changes, take models offline, configure imports in deployed mode, and synchronize changes.

Separate the responsibility for ALM-related tasks between different workspace administrators, who each manage separate workspaces for development, test, and production models. Such tasks may include development, test, and deployment changes to production.

The use of separate workspaces for development, test, and production models is optional. If you do not require segregation of duties, you can store development, test, and production models in a single workspace, subject to the workspace size limit.

You can add revision tags to regularly capture the latest state of a development.

With revision tags you can:

• Synchronize the latest structural changes from a source model to a compatible target model
• Compare revision tags in the same model
• Use a revision tag as the basis for a new model
• Revert a model to the most recently added revision tag

Set production lists to separate your production data from the model’s structural information.

Set production imports and Import Data Source (IDS) definitions to give production administrators the ability to configure imports and import sources in deployed mode.

Use different model modes to protect your production models from unauthorized changes.

Use Standard mode for development models. Standard mode provides all the features and functionality you're used to. When you build a model in Standard mode, it is identical to a model built in earlier versions of Anaplan, before ALM features were introduced.

Enable Deployed mode in test and production models. Deployed mode locks down your production models so that production users, which includes workspace administrators, can only modify production data, not structural information. We recommend you always enable Deployed mode in production and test models.

Take a production model offline to temporarily prevent access to end users.

Use the Compare and Synchronize feature to move the latest structural changes from a source model to a target model. Both models must be structurally compatible.

You compare the latest revision to the target model with a selected revision to the source model. This generates a high-level summary of their structural differences.

If you want a comprehensive summary of the settings and model components that have been added and modified in the source model, you can download a comparison report as a tab-delimited text (.txt) file.

Finally, you can go ahead and synchronize the differences from the source model to the target model.

You can use source models to remap the sources of model-to-model imports.

You can incorporate ALM in your user experience with the features available via ALM for pages. This enables you to associate multiple models with a single page, so you can switch between different source models and change the data that displays.

Pages in apps display data from a single-source model. However, with ALM for pages, workspace administrators can enable multiple models for a page and associate additional models as potential data sources.

For example, as a workspace administrator you could associate both a development model and a production model with a page. A page builder can then draft changes for the page against data from the development model. Production data continues to display for users who only have access to view the page with data from the production model.

After you synchronize the development and production models, you can publish the page changes drafted against data from the development model. The published page updates, so when the production model is selected as the source model, the synchronized data displays correctly.

Anaplan's public REST API enables workspace administrators to use API endpoints to run your ALM processes  and automate model synchronization.

With the public REST API you can:

• Change a model's online status to offline or online
• Create a model synchronization task
• Retrieve the latest revision ID from the target model
• Retrieve compatible source model revisions
• Check the status of a model synchronization task