BMC Compuware ISPW Room for Improvement

RJ
Mainframe Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

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. So if we have an issue where, say, an old load module is missing an alias, it invokes IEBCOPY under the covers, and IEBCOPY returns a bad condition code. But there is nowhere that those messages are reported back to us. That's just a specific issue. 

In general, the logging and the message analysis, the output analysis, could be made easier to use.

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. The admin configuration of it are kind of arcane. It would be nice if the doc were brushed up and maybe there were some step-by-step guides on doing things. There are some out there, but there are some things, like propagation, that are simply not documented and we don't even know how to set it up.

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reviewer1142301 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

My advice for new clients migrating to ISPW is to take the time needed to understand your current inventory of ASIs, code that is not executed/no longer required,  and any unique situations that may need to be handled differently than the standard migration approach.   This vendor is great in walking through different options and finding solutions for any special handling.   

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JS
CTO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The solution could be improved by being better integrated with the open world. In the next release, I would like to have the ability to work in an open environment whilst remaining integrated with the legacy environment.

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Buyer's Guide
BMC Compuware ISPW
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about BMC Compuware ISPW. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user625350 - PeerSpot reviewer
Support for Development Teams on Mainframe at CNP TI
  • The ISPW plugin could be improved to add some functionality which is already in ISPF panels and not in the plugin. 
  • It could also be improved to better help the developer manage merging versions in the life cycle (even if he can already use Eclipse merge view), and to have prompts on warnings and errors during generation and deployment, followed by a pop-up and before the promotion task.  
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Buyer's Guide
BMC Compuware ISPW
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about BMC Compuware ISPW. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.