Blog

Friday, 09 September 2016

Written by Rene De Vleeschauwer

Based on the comments and reactions I got it seems clear that every stakeholder (developer, quality assurance, operations...) look at the discussions mostly from their perspective. Which is human.

But be it traditional or modern mainframe development there should be an end-to-end view, taking into account the requirements of every stakeholder and taking into account the whole process:

• What do I need from my developers as a tester to facilitate my job?
• And how can we make sure the operators get all the information and deliverables they need?
• And how do we assure correct and timely feedback when something goes wrong?
• Is every process step reliable, documented, repeatable and verifiable?

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Monday, 05 September 2016

Written by Rene De Vleeschauwer

First of all, thank you for the many comments and likes on last week’s post. Sorry for being late this week, but we had to submit a large RFP before midnight Friday!

Versioning on the mainframe

In a PDS, you can have one copy of your program: when you change and save it with the same name, the old copy will be overwritten and you will have no history.

Although some editors can create a backup of the file before updating, this does not give the same functionality as a proper versioning system.

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Friday, 26 August 2016

Written by Rene De Vleeschauwer

DevOps finally is about quality and productivity. How can I develop faster and better and how can I get my applications faster and more frequent into production? Every stakeholder and every optimized process step can contribute to these objectives.

Let us start with the developers and their development environments. We just show two major development environments to develop mainframe code.

Standard Mainframe editor

On IBM z/OS, the most commonly used editor is ISPF (Interactive System Productivity Facility). ISPF provides developers features for application development and for administering the z/OS operating system. The features include:

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Friday, 19 August 2016

Written by Rene De Vleeschauwer

An integrated ALM/DevOps solution brings a bunch of advantages for the company as a whole. Within that company, every stakeholder will also experience significant time and money savings. It goes without saying that productivity gains for one stakeholder have an impact on the other stakeholders and finally on the entire company. The benefits for an organization as a whole fall down in two categories.

Benefits for an organization as a whole

Tangible (direct financial impact)

• Improved cost and budget management ability
• Reduced time spent to build and deploy applications in production
• Improved time-to-market

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