Re: Help us migrate to ILE RPG

[booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

Gerald, here's a couple of results I've seen that management liked. 

Firstly, individual programs now are rarely over a few hundred lines long. 
 The benefit of this is that a project finishes quicker, debugs quicker, 
goes through quality assurance quicker and is in production sooner. 
Additionally future enhancements and maintenance become relatively easy. 
Another advantage is that these smaller programs are picked up by new 
staff much quicker  -  their learning curve is much shorter for them and 
they are producing useful work in days instead of months or years.

Secondly, while I can not explain this, it does appear to be true: 
programmers will produce applications that do things that you could never 
do before.  Management will see their data sliced and diced in new ways 
and they'll dare ask for reports and drilldowns that have terrified us 
programmers until now.

One other comment I'd make: the technical learning curve is much shorter 
than the real learning curve.  Suggest to them to start slowly and think 
in terms of a two or three year transitional period while your shop begins 
to unleash the power in 64 bit processing.

_______________________
Booth Martin
Booth@MartinVT.com
http://www.MartinVT.com
_______________________




"Gerald Magnuson" <magnuson@knapheide.com>
Sent by: owner-rpg400-l@midrange.com
01/16/2001 11:33 AM
Please respond to RPG400-L

 
        To:     <RPG400-L@midrange.com>
        cc: 
        Subject:        Help us migrate to ILE RPG

We are a small shop (3 programmers, 1 manager).
We need to convince management on cost benefits of
migrating to ILE.  (time justification is what they
want the most)

We have very limited knowledge currently of ILE concepts,
and new enhancements in ILE RPG over RPG3 (RPG400 ((non-ILE
RPG)..)
but part of the migration plan is to get new standards in place
and learn the concepts (We are making good progress on this.)

We have very old code we are maintaining and must not break.
We are a 24-7 shop, and have a large project backlog.

ok, I have shown that we are not different than 80% of the
other shops out there.

We need a good place to find a concise, accurate plan of
time, and material we need to perform the migration to ILE.

We only want to take immediate advantage of a few ILE features
right away. Long field names, max files (no, we cannot re-write
those huge apps), change some programs to service programs that
are called all over the place.

We think we need the following items to move ahead.
1) the concise answer the following question.
                 "What parts of RPG3 will NOT work in ILE RPG?"
2) programming standards, style standards for our shop
3) a tool to perform the conversion
4) a complete timeline-milestone chart of the conversion project.
5) a benefits list.

Can You please either e-mail me what information your shops used
in this process, or direct me to the best places I can find to
get this information.

Thank You

Gerald Magnuson
Knapheide Manufacturing Company
Quincy Il.

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