Pega Platform developers use Agile practices to create applications and commit the changes into branches in a shared development environment. Automated and manual testing provides rapid feedback to developers so that they can improve the application.

Follow these best practices to optimize the development process:

• Leverage multiple built-on applications to develop and process smaller component applications. Smaller applications move through the pipeline faster and are easier to develop, test, and maintain.
• Create one Pega Platform instance as a source environment that acts as a single source of truth for the application. This introduces stability into the developer environment and ensures that a problem in one developer environment does not affect other environments.
• Use Pega Platform developer tools, for example:
  • The rule compare feature allows you to see the differences between two versions of a specific rule.
  • The rule form search tool allows you to find a specific rule in your application.
• Follow branch-based development practices:
  • Developers can work on a shared development environment or local environments.
  • Content in branches migrates from the development environments to merge into the source environment.
  • Create an archive by exporting and storing backup versions of each branch in a separate location in the application repository. If a corrupted system state requires you to restore the source environment to a previous known good application version, the branches can be down-merged to reapply the changes in those branches that were lost as part of the restore.
  • Use unit tests to ensure quality.
• Ensure that the work on a ruleset is reviewed and that the changes are validated. Lock every complete and validated ruleset.
• Regularly synchronize the development environments with the source environment.

For more information, see the following articles and help topics:

• Application development
  • Understanding best practices for DevOps-based development workflows
  • Using multiple built-on applications
  • Searching for a rule
  • Checking out a rule
  • Checking in a rule
  • Comparing rule versions
  • Understanding best practices for version control in the DevOps pipeline
• Branching
  • Rule development in branches
  • Merging branches into target rulesets
  • Using the Lock and Roll feature for managing ruleset versions
  • Adding a branch from a repository
  • Publishing a branch to a repository
  • Creating a toggle
• Testing
  • Pega Platform application testing in the DevOps pipeline
  • PegaUnit testing