GuardIEn at the Flemish Ministry of Education
Flemish Ministry of Education - Customer Profile
From 1992, Gen was chosen as analysis and development environment within our organisation. Within the department of Education, almost 1000 procedures have been developed acting on a data model of 650 entities.
The developed objects are migrated and generated in 3 technical MVS/DB2-environments, based on separate CICS-regions and DB2-subsystems and target-libraries.
There was a need to optimise the promotion-process for Gen applications. Up until the end of 1995, the migrations and (re-)generations were performed using in-house developed procedures (based on aggregate set-contents and where-used analysis). Those tools were not integrated; in some cases we still had to run compare-reports, the generation-process had to be started after ‘manual’ control of the migrations.
Because of our policy that consists of migration and regeneration in each environment, in order to keep full consistency between the encyclopedia-objects and the run-time-environment we looked for a tool tightly integrated with our development environment.
Hence, GuardIEn was chosen because of its ability to work on development-objects rather than on run-time-objects (sources, load-modules, DBRM’s, ...).
Since June,1 1996 the whole promotion-process is executed using GuardIEn.
Using GuardIEn, we can list a number of experiences below :
- the developers appreciate the ‘when changed’-reporting; moreover it is possible to combine the results of multiple searches into one change-request
- the developers frequently use the where-used reporting capabilities of GuardIEn, with faster and more complete results than using reporting tools within Gen Encyclopedia-tools
- the development co-ordinators appreciate the integration of the promotion-process (backup-migration, migration, generation, ...) and the scheduling and control capabilities
- with GuardIEn, it is also possible to promote combined change requests, and still keep all the necessary information about the separate change requests.
As a conclusion, we appreciate especially the tight integration of GuardIEn with Gen development environment and the enhanced management tools within GuardIEn.