RE: Pause technique

Darrell,

You have a good point about the ROI, particularly since the original
posters process only runs once a year.

But I have to wonder how realistic it is that the verification takes
only an hour and the programming would take 50.

In addition, I think you have to remember to take into account the cost
resulting from the guy who's been doing the verification for the last 10
years leaving or getting hit by a truck.  Maybe the verification is a
well documented process, in which case don't forget the cost of
maintaining the documentation.

In short, if you look hard enough I think one would find that the ROI is
reasonable.  IMHO, what stops most shops is:

- they've always done it this way.
- they don't see it as "expecting and accepting failure"

Lastly, I have to wonder, what is the percentages of home-grown vs.
third party software that use this technique of checkpoint validation
restartability.  Off the top of my head I can't think of a third party
package that does it, but I've not seen all that many.  Every place I've
seen it was a home-grown application.  That tells us something I
think....



Charles Wilt
--
iSeries Systems Administrator / Developer
Mitsubishi Electric Automotive America
ph: 513-573-4343
fax: 513-398-1121
  

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Darrell A Martin
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 8:35 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: Pause technique

Hi, Charles:

I think the possibility of restarting is implicit in the 
problem as it was 
stated. Otherwise there is no point to verification.

I agree that it is not desirable to have processes that 
assume failure. In 
a perfect world, programmers would not write bugs, hardware would not 
fail, and the effects of configuration changes and upgrades 
would always 
be fully understood and anticipated. That world is not the 
one we live in. 
So, although failure should not be ACCEPTED it must be ANTICIPATED.

Eventually, one would fervently hope, the programs in 
question would run 
so reliably that the multi-step verification would not be 
necessary. At 
the same time, it would probably be a good thing if the 
verification steps 
were handled programmatically and the recovery were likewise 
"automatic". 
But if that combined programming effort would require 50 
hours; and if the 
human verification takes only 1 hour a year, and there are no other 
objective or subjective costs; the project to eliminate 
verification will 
be dead on arrival for business reasons. If verification takes a lot 
longer, then of course at some point the ROI could be acceptable.

Darrell

Darrell A. Martin  -  630-754-2187
Manager, Computer Operations
dmartin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 09/27/2006 12:12:22 PM:

You didn't ask about restarting, just how to pause the job stream.

I assume that if your check fails you cancel the current 

job stream and

restart at the appropriate place.

As a side note, I absolutely abhor this kind of processing. 

 It seems to

me that by processing this way, failure is an expected and 

acceptable

occurrence.  IMHO, that's an indicator of something 

seriously wrong with

the design and implementation of a system.


Charles Wilt

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