Re: RES: ChangeMan ZMF Software

Thanks Ituriel,

In this case, I'm the software house - well at least a contractor. I've never worked with Changeman before, so I'm learning lots about it. When I'm done with this contract in 3 months or so, maybe someone else will hire me as a contractor to update their Changeman software. Ituriel - I don't think I would want to go to your shop - only US companies.

I did get one reply off list from a gentleman at Changeman. He was helpful, but confirmed my suspicions that there isn't a lot of automated help available. Changeman is a great product. It would be better if they automated some of the customization from release to release.

Eric

---- ITURIEL DO NASCIMENTO NETO <4254.ituriel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We do have Changeman too and upgrading process is always a concern.
Every time we need to upgrade, we hire the software house to do all
the steps, and i think that, even they are afraid to migrate.

Atenciosamente / Regards / Saludos

Ituriel do Nascimento Neto
Banco Bradesco S/A
4254/DPCD Alphaville
Engenharia de Software - Sistemas Operacionais Mainframes

|
|I'm installing Changeman ZMF 5.6.2 at Aviva. I'm just curious
|how other people go about upgrading this software. I've been
|working on this for about a month now. It seems like there
|are no automated tools to recustomize everything. We are
|coming from release 5.3.6. These are some of my
|concerns:
|
|There are several custom libraries, where all of your specific
|site cusomization goes. When running the product, the custom
|libraries are concatenated in front of the product libraries
|distributed with the system. Two of the libraries with the
|greatest number of changes are the Panel libraries and the
|Skeleton libraries. As far as I can tell, Serena offers no
|tools to automate, or partially automate the upgrades. I have
|been using the M+R (Merge + Reconcile) option, where I bring
|up the base skeleton, the new skeleton, and our previously
|customized skeleton library to see where the changes are, and
|where the new changes in the new release go. This helps a
|lot, but it is very tedious. Actually, I just finished the
|skeletons yesterday, although I have yet to start testing
|them. The skeletons and panels seem to be the biggest sources
|of change and customization work.
|
|The other part that seems really time consuming is setting up
|the test system. We have a test system, but currently it is
|in use for some other changes we are putting in, so I have set
|up my own system. According to the scheduler here, you pretty
|much have to reenter all of your applications and all of your
|libraries by hand. He did the last 2 upgrades, but they hired
|me to do this because he can't devote the time needed for the
|upgrade. Reentering all of your applications and all of your
|libraries means tons of screen printing, and lots of manual
|entry. I would think Serena would have come up with a way to
|do this semiautomatically, just changing some of the dataset
|names. I talked to Serena about this a couple of times. They
|say DON'T COPY the VSAM files, because you will screw up your
|production system while testing, and they don't have any
|programs to help you do this.
|
|Does anyone have any automated tools they would be willing to share?
|
|Thanks,
|
|Eric Bielefeld
|
--
Eric Bielefeld
Systems Programmer
Aviva USA
Des Moines, Iowa
515-645-5153

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