Blog
March 27, 2018 | Una Verhoeven
As part of quality control, many companies are legally obligated to provide documents and additional resources for technical audits.
Often a requirement of a release to Production is that the implementation partner must provide extra release documentation, including the impact the change has and (possibly) other information. Most companies, for example, have their own standards in place; coding standards, quality checks or backup plans could also be part in the documentation. These are the components that developers must provide as a part of the change request. Incorporating the agile way of working, these are, generally, part of the agile definition of ‘done’.
When it comes to the specifications, these requirements are easily fulfilled. Each of the developers know what they have been working on and which files have been affected, but when it comes to the Sitecore items keeping track of these changes may be time consuming. Even though all changes are tracked in Source Control, it is not realistic to document every Sitecore item change - that would quickly become quite costly. A Sitecore developers time is better spent on the actual implementation rather than on the processes around it. Teams also frequently work on feature branches; once these are done, the feature branch gets deleted and merged to the Master branch. This makes the tracking even more time consuming.
This kind of functionality is available out of the box with Team Development for Sitecore. TDS Classic provides Project Report generation for Sitecore items.
To build a Project Report, you must have a valid TDS Classic connector with Sitecore’s site. TDS Classic will retrieve all the fields and templates for the selected project. Reports can be either in XML or Markdown (.md) format. The XML report will also create an XSLT to convert the XML into HTML, so it can be shown in a browser. If you wish to change the HTML displayed, you should edit the XSLT as needed. Once you run the build, the report will be generated on the file system where your TDS project is located, under the folder Report.
You can very easily filter the report since every item has Created by and Last updated by nodes.
Item report example:
Created by:sitecore\virtualssuser on 27/01/2018 23:55:00
Last updated by:sitecore\uverhoeven on 28/01/2018 00:09:05
With enabling Project Reporting, each of your teams will always have documented Sitecore change in a readable format in parallel with the Source Control version history.
Learn more about the helpful features of TDS Classic or start your free trial!
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