On Behalf of Rose Sakach (CA Technologies, Sr. Product Manager) Systems Programmers tasks and responsibilities vary from site to site. Responsibilities can range from Installation, upgrade, and maintenance of products to providing utilities for applications (both z/OS and business) and administering various products (such as CICS, RACF/ACF2/Top Secret or Endevor or CA-7 etc.). In my experience, Systems Programmers were the Subject Matter Experts (SME) on all of the Systems Software/applications and were responsible for much more than the SMP/E-related tasks.
Given the type of responsibility described above, there is absolutely a use-case for Endevor in a Systems Programmers daily life. Endevors change history capabilities alone is worth the effort involved in configuring and using the product. Having the capability to instantly view the exact lines of code that were changed, who made the change, when it was made and have access to any/all prior versions of source code can save a tremendous amount of time. This beats having to search a PDS for the OLD copy of the source or was it the OLD-OLD-copy that I need? How do I know if I wasnt the one who made the backup copy? I can attest to the fact that Endevor has saved me on several occasions when I made changes to maintenance jobs (JCL) for products and had to back them out in a hurry (and subsequently fix them) to meet an SLA for say CICS availability. Any/all types of application-like components, such as maintenance jobs for databases (i.e. RACF) or CICS regions (i.e! . start-up JCL), and especially any site-specific product customization jobs can and should be housed within Endevor. This has been implemented and utilized VERY successfully at several of my prior employers one of which was a very large financial institution. They key to success here, is to keep it simple. Endevor is flexible enough to provide a separate mini life-cycle tailored for Systems Programming use. This will allow your site to use ONLY the features in Endevor that will support the existing process with the benefit or providing the safety net that enables quick recovery. The change history, version control, audit trail, and back-out capability justifies its use. Endevor could even hasten the process by providing automated approvals instead of either a paper-trail or a ticketing system requirement. For example, if the Systems Programmer change impacts RACF, the RACF ADMIN Mgr could be an approver. If the change impacts DB2 the DB2 Mgr could be the approver and so on. If the current process requires NO APPROVAL, Endevor could mimic that as well. Use only what is of value here. A 2-stage environment with minimal types (i.e. JCL, PROC, COBOL, ASSEMBLER, REXX?) with minimal or no approval requirements could provide! it all. Point here is the product is flexible enough to provide MANY benefits that could save time, reduce outages, and improve productivity. I highly recommend it and would be happy to provide guidance for anyone interested in implementing it. - Rose Sakach ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
