Named Ruleset: A Long-Lived Parallel Development Architecture for Enterprise-Scale Pega Implementations

Abstract

Pega Platform™ is a market leader in BPM/CRM, low-code, buy-and-build, and build-for-change solutions, enabling organizations to develop digital solutions more rapidly compared to traditional programming. Pega Platform™ provides a robust application development environment, with separate portals for citizen developers (“App Studio”), system architects (“Designer Studio”), and system administrators (“Admin Studio”) to rapidly design, build, and manage applications. Pega Application code created using these studios is saved to rulesets, with versions, in Pega’s own code repository. When development teams grow large and multiple functionalities must be developed and delivered in parallel, managing code within the same application ruleset version becomes challenging. The Pega Platform uses Pega branches to support parallel development. These Pega branches allow each team to create and update rules without impacting other teams.

Pega branching is designed for frequent code merges to trunk versions and continuous release to production. In many scenarios, frequent merging and releasing capabilities to production are not feasible for all parallel development teams; they may need to remain in development mode longer before moving to production. Providing a future version for release is a single solution that most customers adopt; it is efficient when customer priorities and release dates remain stable, but it becomes inefficient when those priorities and dates change. In this research paper, we propose an innovative solution to address this problem: a custom branch that maintains development tracks without merging into the trunk, along with its advantages and disadvantages. This proposed solution, called “Named Ruleset,” enabled parallel development teams to remain in a custom branch for years while still incorporating trunk changes. We envision that this custom branching solution can address the limitations of Pega branching and advance the Pega DevOps practice for larger enterprise teams and implementations.