SCM Projects

We have completed many (tons!) of ChangeMan ZMF customization projects over the past 2 decades or so. What is typical among many of these projects:

• All these projects succeeded (= delivered what was promised), with only 1 of them (out of many ...) not delivered on time (but also succeeded in the end).
• Each of these projects typically consisted of somewhere between 1 and 6 man-months.
• Most of the deliverables (interfaces or customizations) of these projects are still in use today (and heavily used!), even though some of them were created long time (over a decade ...) ago.
• They hardly require any maintenance when upgrading to a new ChangeMan ZMF release (because of the techniques we use to build such customizations).

Here are some of these projects related to customizations that are typically useful at any ChangeMan ZMF implementation (many customers would like SERENA to consider them for inclusion in vanilla ChangeMan ZMF):

• Support for dynamically called subroutines in ChangeMan ZMF (complementing ChangeMan ZMF's audit feature for statically called subroutines).
• Implement an automated solution (integrated in the release management process also) to enable mass updates in ChangeMan ZMF, applied to selected components of a specific library type, residing in any of the ChangeMan ZMF managed libraries (like in DFZ packages, baseline 0, production libraries, etc). This is typically used to apply mass conversions of JCLs, PRCs, PSBs or during (old versions of) compiler upgrades.
• Enable ChangeMan ZMF's promotion/demotion functions to also manage component types for which the typical concatenations (i.e. test libs concatenated with prodlibs) cannot be used, like MFS format blocks, ACBGEN libraries, JCL SYSINs or anything that requires an extra 'import' after vanilla promotion / demotion processing completed (e.g: to load it into CA-7, some DBMS, etc).
• Implement a solution (= ERO-lite) to perform release management with ChangeMan ZMF 5.3.x (the first release that came with XML) as a temporary solution while waiting for ChangeMan ZMF's ERO option to become more mature. ERO-lite typically installs about 500 change packages containing up to 150,000 changed components in (real) production libraries during a release weekend window that is never allowed to exceed 2 hour.
• Manage DDLs with ChangeMan ZMF via integration (= invoked during stage, promote, install, ...) with 3rd party products from BMC, IBM, etc and which includes support for "checkpoint restart within promote/demote" (just re-submitting a failed DDL promote/demote is not an option for these products).
• Implement an ISPF front-end to ChangeMan ZMF's LCT card processing (link-edit control cards), launched whenever an LCT component is edited in ChangeMan ZMF, and supporting all possible LCT card variations.
• ...

Here are some more of these projects related to customizations that are only useful at ChangeMan ZMF implementations that licensed the related 3rd party products (though such customers would like SERENA to consider them also for inclusion in vanilla ChangeMan ZMF):

• Support for special (programming) languages in ChangeMan ZMF, not supported by vanilla ChangeMan ZMF, such as:
  • Adabas / Natural.
  • Cool:Gen.
  • QMF.
• Manage DB2 table data contents with ChangeMan ZMF.
• ...

Apart from the 2 flavors of projects above, we also get involved in traditional ChangeMan ZMF upgrade projects,  which might include skipping (major)  intermediate releases (e.g. upgrade from V 5.6.3 to V 7.1.2, so skip any V6* version in between). For such upgrade projects, our consultants come equipped with an appropriate (limited) license of our SCM solutions (included in their daily rates). Here are some related (if time permits) tasks (on top of the actual upgrade tasks):

• Measure the actual upgrade progress, as illustrated in this recent upgrade project.
• ChangeMan ZMF training and knowledge transfer to ChangeMan ZMF administrators and operators (to teach them about how they can do similar upgrades in the future themselves).
• ChangeMan ZMF implementation audit, using AbitMORE SCM Reporting to identify all sorts of outdated, obsolete or inconsistent information stored in ChangeMan ZMF.
• ChangeMan ZMF implementation tuning, using AbitMORE SCM Commander and XML services to get all ChangeMan ZMF environments in good shape (again).
• Training about ChangeMan ZMF's XML services, using AbitMORE SCM Commander to get started with XML, to explore the XML universe in ChangeMan ZMF, and to address various XML enhancement requests not (yet) available in standard ChangeMan ZMF.
• Reduce the amount of ChangeMan ZMF customizations using solutions available via dr.chgman.com.

The above lists are (extremely) incomplete lists! If you wonder if we can help you with any other specific customizations or interfaces to ChangeMan ZMF, just contact us! FYI: we estimate there is a chance of at least 95% we've solved your request before ... If not we're fairly confident we can address your requirements also!