Silver Bullet Follow Up

Hank wrote in his summary of the Silver Bullet Product's review:

>- There are plans of building a report which will list the lines of code
>effected by the file changes, so the programmer can go in and manually
change
>the code.
That would be nice. I hope they design it so the programmers can see the
report BEFORE the product makes the changes to production files.

>- There is a limit of 35 fields available for date fields. Each of these
has
>to be hand entered, telling the program where they reside. There is no
>interface to any impact analysis tool.
That's not terribly helpful IMO, since what people want/need is a product
that alerts them to field names they DON'T know about!  And in a decent
sized shop the variations on a date name (e.g. with file name prefixes)
could easily go over that limit.

>- The program is totally dependent upon field reference files. If you do
not
>have field reference files, you cannot use the program.
That's a pretty strict limitation.  Most of the companies I've worked for
use reference files, but not for everything.  Until I started working here
<grin>...but we already changed all our stuff to be century safe (we had a
much smaller number of files and programs than most places would though.)

- The program will not make any program changes.
Well, that's where most of the work is!  Changing the database fields is
the easy part.  Making all the pgms work correctly  together afterwards is
the challenging part.

>- The claim to change 100% of dates was mollified. The current claim is
that
>the product handles 100% of the dates tested. They do not guarantee to
>convert 100% of the dates in the field.
More realistic than the press release.  

Overall, I'm not impressed.  I don't think this product will save much time
for folks.  But the claims summarized above are certainly more believable
than the original press release.  Sounds like marketing finally talked to
development.

Ilena Ayala
Barsa Consulting Group
(The opinions expressed here are not necessarily the opinions of my
employer, except when they are.)
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