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rayandqmf
New User
Joined: 04 May 2005
Posts: 2
Location: Columbus, OH
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Hello,
My company is considering replacing all of our Compuware tools with IBM tools. Here is what they are proposing:
Compuware
__________
FileAid
Expediter
Intertest
Strobe
IBM
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File Manager
Debug
Fault Analyzer
APA
The mainframe developers here are worried about this proposed replacement and I would like to know if anyone else has gone through a change in tools where they replaced Compuware with IBM. Or, if you have any experience with the IBM tools and if they can do the job that their equivalent does from Compuware. Thank you for any input, I appreciate it. |
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daveporcelan
Active Member
Joined: 01 Dec 2006
Posts: 792
Location: Pennsylvania
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Nobody likes change, and neither did we.
We made a similar conversion a few years ago.
Xpediter (correct spelling) to Debug Tool (correct name) -
Once you get used to it, it is pretty much the same. You can create alias command names to still use the Xpediter name but perform the matching Debug Tool function.
Easy enough to compile (actually, we changed our standard compile proc so that it gets done automatically). Easy enough to invoke. Used for both Batch and Online.
Intertest (actually a CA product) to Debug Tool - See above
? (Abend-Aid?) to Fault Analyzer - Also pretty much the same for 'hard abends'. For 'soft' abends (user initiated) it depends more on the information you provide before abending. The program file used by this tool is the same one used by Debug Tool.
We did not get the other tools.
Hope this helps Roy. |
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don.leahy
Active Member
Joined: 06 Jul 2010
Posts: 767
Location: Whitby, ON, Canada
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A few years back I was in a shop that went from:
<nothing> to Debug Tool
Abend aid to Fault Analyzer
File aid to File Manager
Needless to say, going from <nothing> to <any debugging tool> was unanimously welcomed by the programmers.
Abend aid to Fault Analyzer was similarly successful, because of FA's ability to merge compile listings with the dump. I understand that Abend aid has a similar capability, but it had never been used at this shop.
The transition from File aid to File Manager was not quite as smooth. I think the reason was simply that these products were less likely to be used every day, so it took longer to become proficient.
IMO, the key to success is to integrate the products into your existing toolkit. Heed daveporcelan's advice to update your standard compile procedure. You should also ensure that your "side files" are promoted to production libraries at the same time as your source code.
One of my favourite features of these products is that they allow you to write user exits in Rexx. This is a very powerful capability that makes it easy to tailor them to your own environment. Even though I am a humble application programmer, I had no difficulty in coding up some exits and recommending them to the systems programmer. |
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saravananj
New User
Joined: 23 Nov 2007
Posts: 17
Location: Chennai
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| All these tools are good. But compuware tools are more user friendly in my opinion. Once you get used to these new IBM tools, I am sure everyone will enjoy using them. I would love to hear the reason for this change? |
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don.leahy
Active Member
Joined: 06 Jul 2010
Posts: 767
Location: Whitby, ON, Canada
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| saravananj wrote: |
| All these tools are good. But compuware tools are more user friendly in my opinion. Once you get used to these new IBM tools, I am sure everyone will enjoy using them. I would love to hear the reason for this change? |
In the case that I mentioned, it was all about money. They were planning a hardware upgrade that would have greatly increased the licensing cost of the Compuware products. The IBM tools cost a small fraction (rumoured to be 20%) of the cost of their Compuware equivalents.
I think that many would agree that, initially, the IBM tools were inferior to their competition. But I have found that since their introduction big Blue has been very aggressive about improving them to the point that a shop converting now will lose very little, if any, functionality. |
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sunojsm
Warnings : 1
New User
Joined: 21 Jun 2004
Posts: 33
Location: Andorra
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Hi rayandqmf,
My company already did this change two months ago and I am forced to use these tools.
To my opinion,these new tools has similar operations only, with some extra features.But I got frustrated to learn this initially and felt more complicated,still I need to explore more.
Personally I like the debug tool very much.
Thanks. |
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