Re: IBM's CCCA and customized LCPs for Enterprise COBOL migration

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 18:07:04 GMT, Arnold Trembley <arnold.trembley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


Endevor is a large and flexible tool. Our biggest problem with it is
managing concurrent or parallel development.

CVS and Subversion (both open source) are excellent for concurrent development. In normal
mode, checked out files are not locked. On checkin, the file is not replaced, changes are
merged into it.

Most major VCSs offer merging as an option, but corporate users almost always turn it off
under the mistaken belief that software can't possibly be smart enough to merge code
without error. The genius of CVS is that you CANNOT turn it off (there actually is a way,
but the admin won't tell you about it). Subversion (SVN) does permit locks because it
supports a wider variety of file types, with MIME links to merge and compare programs.

If a production program
needs an emergency fix we can do it, jumping over in-flight
development, but the code change must then be manually retrofitted to
multiple in-flight versions for various product releases. Much of
that problem is bureaucratic red tape.

Moving changes upstream is one of the more difficult problems in change management. It is
very common for production and QA fixes to be overwritten by the next release.

When the mentality is merging rather than replacing, it's EASY to mechanically merge
changes into upstream releases. It is best overseen by a change management administrator
because none of the other players have an incentive. Waterfall methodologies don't deal
with it because they hate to admit there are errors in production code.




.

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