![]() | Anonymous User Mainframe Architect at a financial services firm |
![]() | Anonymous User Compliance Manager at a hospitality company |
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
"The visual ability to see potential downstream impacts to changes being made assists our developers in understanding the impact associated with their change."
"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 of the operations folks and off 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... ISPW is constantly aware of it. It notifies when someone else is using or has a different version of that component."
"We audit once a year for our ChangeMan access, accurate financial programs, and all of that. Auditors really love ChangeMan for how easy it is to get through and how tight the security is on it. Our internal auditors, external auditors, and SOX editors love this solution. We're in the healthcare business, so HIPAA regulations and all such things are a big deal, and this makes all that really simple."
"Scalability is great. It has absolutely met every need for us so far. We do have some concurrent development paths and we're able to flexibly assign variables. At the same time, our skeletons assemble where we want them to, so the scalability is very good."
"Better discussions to identify inventory prior to the start of any migration would be helpful for potential clients that have applications with code that is not modified often."
"One thing I would really like to see some improvement on is the promotion diagnostic messages. It invokes utilities "under the covers" to copy components, and it does not echo back any of the error messages from those utilities."
"There are some features that are not well documented, so documentation could use a little help, on things like setting up deployment and which structures in the database correspond to which tables."
"As such, there's nothing wrong with the product. It is great, but there are small things that can be better to make it much more friendly. The way you navigate through fields can be improved. If I'm going to stage a component over something that exists and that I've created in another library, and I want to pull it in and write it over what I've got there in my package, I've got to type in that data set name every time. That can be aggravating. It is not a big deal. The way things are sorted can also be improved. If you're doing a delete of a bunch of components, you can't sort those out by type or anything. Some things are just standard, and you can't look at them in a way that would be helpful."
"I would like to see them enable parallel development for online. It's available now for batch stuff on the mainframe. Jenkins, IBM, and Rocket all supposedly already have safe and workable version of Git for the mainframe. With that in mind, we need to know where our feature is."
"I like the seat-based licensing much more than MSU-based licensing, and that the cost has been competitive."
"It's on a yearly basis. I am not aware of any additional costs."
Earn 20 points
A modern, end-to-end Agile source code management, release automation and deployment automation tool that enables mainframe application developers at all skill levels to fulfill business requirements, optimize code quality, and improve developer productivity through mainframe DevOps. With ISPW, developers can:
Compuware ISPW is ranked 2nd in Software Configuration Management with 2 reviews while Serena ChangeMan ZMF is ranked 6th in Software Configuration Management with 2 reviews. Compuware ISPW is rated 9.0, while Serena ChangeMan ZMF is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Compuware ISPW writes "Does our CICS NEWCOPYs and Db2 binds, reducing operations and DBA workloads". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Serena ChangeMan ZMF writes "It simplifies things and has tight security but needs better technical support and a few enhancements". Compuware ISPW is most compared with CA Endevor Software Change Manager, IBM Engineering Workflow Management and IBM Rational Synergy, whereas Serena ChangeMan ZMF is most compared with CA Endevor Software Change Manager, Dimensions CM and IBM Engineering Workflow Management.
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