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David,



With regards the example you have given about using client type to determine
their preferences for biscuits, you are making a business decision that all
purple clients like biscuits and red ones not. That's fine if it's true and
so can be programmed in with a function, but will cause more problems later
if some purple renegade starts liking cakes. You need to program for
flexibility and agility for the business dynamic too of course.



To allow for design flexibility without impacting development productivity,
I would say the real problem lies with impact analysis and change. Not so
much change management per se. Change management systems are for managing
the change once you have done the analysis right. Impact analysis is
required to establish precisely what needs to be changed, and development
tools are for making the changes required.



Even with legacy tools like Hawkeye/Pathfinder, tracing a potential field
addition or extension through all of its permutations and computations
through all effected programs, can be a significant task. For instance if
you change variable VAR_A in PGM_A and this moves into VAR_B somewhere in
PGM_A and is passed as a PARM when calling PGM_B, then in PGM_B entry PARM_A
gets moved into PARM_C and passed as PARM_C into PGM_D. Then you have the
problem of renames and prefixes against files in programs. The list goes on.
Having such precise information up front will mean that the CMS project will
have the right elements in, and also your colleagues will know the impact of
their changes across the system not just in their own environments. No CMS
system provides this level of analysis.



Secondly but just as importantly adding or expanding a field in an RPG based
system can be a big job when rolled out through all of the impacted
programs/files as described above. This usually lengthens the cycle of
change considerably and adds to the risk of cross changes causing
consistency and testing problems.



So my advice would be to allow yourself and your colleagues the luxury of
design choice as the situation for the business demands, allowing for growth
and change as others have mentioned. Use the right tools for impact analysis
and database changes and SCM too of course.



The only tools I know of that handle variable tracing analysis, and
automated field addition and expansion are: X-Analysis & X-Resize
respectively. If you don't already have an SCM tool then Mr Gibb's
Implementer referred to by Jonathan is probably best of breed for IBM i



Stuart


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