CA Endevor Software Change Manager Pros and Cons

It puts all our source in one product. We know where to go to gather all our source code and which source is associated with which executable. It's a one-stop-shop, one place to go for everything.

The developers can very easily see what has changed on a particular piece of source code or a program, and others can look at that as well so they can coordinate their changes. It makes it much easier to promote a piece of code up to production.

We have been able to replicate entire SDLCs for new clients and have them loaded and ready to use Endevor in as little as one week. This was possible with the use of Endevor variables within the processors, so that a single processor was able to function for multiple systems across the entire SDLC.

The approach of writing a single set of Endevor processors to work across multiple instances of the application (separate systems) made the processors fairly complex, but once you understand them, they are so powerful.

One feature of Endevor is its Backout feature. If there is a problem, it can back out the executables. The only problem with that is that it will not back out the source in Endevor. For example, you can do a back out and it will back out the executable to the previous version, but it doesn't back out the source version in Endevor. It would make it much better if when you did a back out of Endevor, it would back out both the source and the executable and keep them in sync.

Needs more audit capability when it comes to changes to settings that are made by administrators, as many of these are done through the panels and are therefore not logged as an action against a configuration item.