Working notes from real z/OS engagements — Endevor-to-Git migrations, DBB builds, IDz performance, code pages, and mainframe CI/CD. The same knowledge we bring to yours.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. This is one of the twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto, and is a key step in changing the culture in an organization as it moves to Agile development and other DevOps principles. This is not a new concept however. Although it has been studied on … Read more
What is WIP? WIP stands for Work In Progress. Limiting your work in progress is a concept of Scaled Agile Framework or SAFe. By limiting your WIP, you force your team to focus on completing existing tasks before starting new tasks or requirements in the project. Let’s start with an analogy: the “honey-do list”. Its … Read more
If you are currently running IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) on version 7, you have until April of 2018 to upgrade. After that, IBM will no longer offer you support (other than to tell you to upgrade). However there hundreds of custom ISV solutions that have not yet been certified for new versions of the … Read more
CLM Clustering is Dead! Anyone who has worked on WebSphere App server certainly should be familiar with the deployment manager and cluster typologies. One would have thought that since RTC is a Java application, that the native WAS clustering would be a perfect fit. Unfortunately, it was not. Team concert ended support for horizontal clustering … Read more
We help our customers implement software using Agile methods and a DevOps approach. These notes have been growing as we’ve worked with more and more customers. I expect to have more in the future as well, but these several items are recurring issues I see time and time again. Hopefully, even if you are not one … Read more
At a recent customer, we had the opportunity to implement RDz’ Push-to-Client (P2C) functionality. Discussions were had with the customer on the best way to distribute common settings and customizations for RDz among the user community and P2C was the winner. P2C functionality involves creating a customized workspace, exporting that workspace to USS on … Read more
On a recent project where we were implementing Rational Team Concert for a large z/OS shop, we were requested for performance metrics for the Rational Build Agent (BLZBFA). The amount of data on existing metics is sparse, but there is some information in the Jazz Deployment Wiki. I found a great article on setting up … Read more
This list is by no means complete (that would take weeks to compile). This list is constructed based on our past several months experience on IBM engagements and customers implementing IBM DevOps software. We will likely update this list well into the future. CCM = The Change and Configuration Management application running on WebSphere … Read more
Reasoning We’ve been involved in several large scale deployments of Rational Developer for System z. The product is an incredible piece of software that can drastically improve software development productivity. It also will drastically change your development organization’s culture (usually for the better). However to have the best culture change, you need to be prepared … Read more
The central tenant of any good Agile methodology is a prioritized daily task list. Even if you are not a developer, you’ll see this concept in business, such as in the Franklin-Covey time management series, or David Allen’s GTD. Its all about breaking up large tasks into achievable chunks, and timeboxing your work in progress … Read more