Phase of change cycle is preventing execution of transport related activity. How to change this behavior?

The phase control of change cycles is allowing or disallowing certain transport related activities dependent on the current phase.

Some famous examples are:

  • Development without Release / Test / Go Live Preparation:
    • Transport Request of Normal Changes cannot be released
    • Transport of Copies of Normal Changes cannot be created and released
  • GoLive:
    • Transport Requests of Normal Changes cannot be released
    • Transport of Copies of Normal Changes cannot be created and released
    • Transport Requests of Urgent Changes cannot be released
    • Import All into Test is not allowed
    • Import of Urgent Changes into Test or Prod is not allowed
    • Only in this phase an Import All in Production is allowed

When implementing Change Requests in an agile manner like SCRUM, this phase based transport control is not wanted. Especially the Go Live phase is a critical thing because we need to switch to this phase to be able to import all transports into production but at the same time developers are blocked in continuing their development.

Good news:

This is just configuration. In other words: We are able to remove these restrictions and allow production import in „Development with Release“ or Transport Request release in phase „Go Live“.

  1. Call SM34
  2. Open view cluster /TMWFLOW/VC_PHMD
  3. Select phase model (e.g. DEVRL or MNTCL)
  4. Select phase (e.g. DEVELOP_AND_RELEASE or GO_LIFE)
  5. Add or remove action (e.g. SM_IMP_PROD or RC_TR_RELEASE)

Caution: This configuration is delivered by SAP. It is officially not allowed to change these settings. It might happen that you will lose SAP support for SAP incidents in this area. If you remove some entries they might be restored after activating object piece list in SOLMAN_SETUP again which is a regular activity after Support Package upgrade.

Note: If you want to allow creation and release of Transport of Copies, you need to allow Transport Request release. If you still want to disallow release of original Transport Request, you need to prevent the corresponding status change dependent on the current change cycle phase. This additional setup is described in another blog.