RE: So what is change management to an IBM i person?

You forgot one - keeping the auditors happy by allowing them to see that the
object versions in the production environment match the ones in the
development environment.

It's a never ending battle to keep developers (and source code) off the
production partitions.

Paul Nelson
Cell 708-670-6978
Office 409-267-4027
nelsonp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David
Gibbs
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2016 9:27 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: So what is change management to an IBM i person?

On 5/25/2016 10:52 PM, Justin Dearing wrote:

But exactly what does an IBM i person expect a holistic change
management system to do? I think once theinks like jenkins, chef and
puppet get working on PASE, such a system could be built with OSS
stuff, and IBM i people could develop a set of best practices for
managing the PASE side of things that would be very interesting to
linux admins.

Well, as most people know, I do work for an IBM i change control vendor ...
so I'm pretty familiar with the concepts.

"Source" control systems are concerned mainly with maintaining just source
code. Most of the open source change control systems (CVS, SVN, GIT, etc)
do a pretty good job at managing source code.

On IBM i change control involves a lot more than just source code ... things
like ...

. Compiling objects
. Object attribute management (authorities, authority adoption, etc)
. Object relationships (recompiling programs when a file is changed)
. Object compilation sequencing (compiling PF's & Tables before LF's, views,
& indexes).
. Deployment of changes to local & remote systems (and partitions)
. Ensuring deployments don't obviously break applications.
. Recovering applications when a deployment goes wrong.
. Managing personnel's authority to work on an application and deploy
changes
. Tracking who changed what and deployed to where

That's just a short list ... most of the mainstream SCM products do a whole
lot more.

david
(Who works for PTC on the Implementer product to pay the bills)