It helped us move more toward an Agile development path. We are closer to that than we had been before because one of the main functions of ISPW is tracking code. Information is real time and displays where the code is and who has it checked out. That is critical information when you have 250 developers in different countries and so many different things are happening at the same time. One of the drawbacks of going to an Agile-type platform is you have to have the tracking  information real time and easy to understand. With ISPW you have that information at hand all the time.  

In terms of time savings, with our previous tools there were different platforms and a lot of customization. One issue with our old system was the process required developers make a request to a special department for code to be made available for change. This could take as long as 3 weeks to get access to programs and JCL in order to start a project. With ISPW the developer has the ability to retrieve all of the components they need into their containers. That's something they can do within minutes. From a time standpoint, that has resulted in huge savings for each project. 

It has provided us with a number of improvements. The biggest improvement is its deployment facility. It does our CICS NEWCOPYs and our Db2 binds for us, whereas before, that was a manual process. It takes a lot of the workload off the operations folks and the DBAs.

We had parallel development before, but the way ISPW implements it is better. It has more control and oversight of the process, whereas before, it was like the Wild West. Everybody could have their own package with their own version of the component in it, and they had to do what ChangeMan called an audit before they could promote it. ISPW is constantly aware of it. It notifies when someone else is using or has a different version of that component. It protects the source better than ChangeMan did.

It's also starting to help our organization realize the benefits of DevOps. We're fairly new, and we still haven't had the Topaz training yet, where a lot of that stuff will be more apparent. We'll be able to use the GUI tools.

It helps us develop COBOL while juggling other responsibilities. This is less time consuming than using the old product

We have seen an improvement in the rate and level of quality at which we deploy changes. I don't know if I could give you an accurate percentage. It's probably 100 percent. It's much better. 

With the use of ISPW, we were able to reduce our deployment time for specific applications  by utilizing the auto-deploy features. Using tools such as ISPW also increases our mainframe developer’s knowledge of Eclipse-based tools that the distributed products utilize. 

We’re also experimenting with being able to utilize distributed developers to see if they can utilize the  ISPW analysis tool to identify/make changes in COBOL without really knowing this technology.     

• It helps us with the changing of SCM and ALM products, and also to change the life cycle including two branches.

Of course, it's still a recent migration, so we are still in progress to improve our organization and use of the product.