Using the TMS Quality Assurance Approval Procedure 

As of Release 4.6, you can use the TMS QA approval procedure to make sure that only approved requests are transported into your productive system.

Overview

TMS Quality Assurance increases the quality and the availability of the production systems by letting you check requests in the QA system before they are delivered to subsequent systems.

To use this feature, activate the QA approval procedure in your QA system. When activated, transport requests are only forwarded to the delivery systems if all the QA approval steps are processed for each request in the QA system and each request has been approved. (When you configure the QA system, you determine how many QA approval steps have to be processed for each request.) If a check for an approval step is not successful, the entire request cannot be approved.

Rejected requests are not imported into the delivery systems of the QA system.

If you reject requests, there is the risk that errors may occur when they are imported into the delivery systems. This is a result of the requests containing objects that are referenced from other requests. It is safer to correct an error using a subsequent transport.

Defining Approval Steps

To use the QA approval procedure, one of your systems must be defined as the Quality Assurance system. In this system, you determine the approval steps necessary, with the option to activate the step or deactivate it. For example, the default approvals are configured as follows:

·        Approval by request owner:      Inactive

·        Approval by user department:  Inactive

·        Approval by system administrator:  Active

You can also define other steps in addition to the default approval steps. If you define additional approval steps and have configured more than one QA system, you can determine whether the additional steps are to be system-/client-specific (only one QA system) or cross-system/client (global).

Authorizations

The authorizations necessary for the default approval steps are shown in the table below.

Default Approval Steps

Approval Step	Default Status	Required Authorization
Approved by request owner	Inactive	Own requests No special authorization required because the check is made against your user ID. Other requests Authorization object required: S_CTS_ADMI Field: CTS_ADMFCT Value: TADM and TQAS
Approved by user department	Inactive	Authorization object required: S_CTS_ADMI Field: CTS_ADMFCT Value: QTEA or TADM and TQAS Per default, this is contained in the authorization S_CTS_QATEST or S_CTS_ADMIN.
Approved by system administrator	Active	Authorization object required: S_CTS_ADMI Field: CTS_ADMFCT Value: TADM and TQAS Per default, this is contained in the authorization S_CTS_ADMIN.

Note the following:

·         At least one approval step must be active for each defined QA system.

·         You cannot delete the 3 default approval steps or change the type or the text. You can only set the approval steps to active or inactive.

For more information, see TMS Quality Assurance.