State of North Dakota ITD Report on using Access Gen

Overview

Response Systems' Access Gen is a Windows application designed to provide a direct interface to Computer Associates CA Gen Client Sever Encyclopedia (CSE). Access Gen is designed to provide fast and easy access to the CSE for the developers and encyclopedia model managers. This access provides substantial savings in terms of the time and effort often taken in CSE reporting and model file transferring by providing information regarding models while they are still in the CSE. In addition, there are facilities for impact analysis and problem diagnosis and resolution.

History

In the past State of North Dakota have identified a need to look into 3rd party tools to enhance our abilities to provide customer support and maintenance for our CA Gen written applications. Access Gen is the most commonly used today.

Benefits

The overall response of our evaluation of Access Gen has been that is a very useful and productive tool. Access Gen is very simple to setup and use. There is a client piece that is loaded on each developer's desktop and a server piece that communicates with the CSE. During the evaluation we ran the server piece on one of the developer's machines. It would easily run on our Implementation machine. The following lists the specific benefits realised by the developers when using Access Gen and identifies an increase in overall developer productivity by having instant access to the information that is in the CA Gen Client Server Encyclopedia.

• Access Gen is very intuitive to use and requires little or no training time to use it to its intended potential. The tree diagram is very helpful and allows the developer to quickly see all the called procedure steps and action diagrams. Also, each of these can then be expanded to see the actual code and the view matching between the two action diagrams without performing a checkout.
• The search and cross-reference abilities are incredibly helpful. They allow a developer to confirm objects exist and determine where they are located before anything is checked out. With the current process an educated guess was needed to determine where a certain object would be located.
• Access Gen enhances the identification of where and how an entity is referenced. For example, we want to know which action diagrams create/update/delete a particular entity. Regular CSE reports will only identify that the entity is referenced. It will not specify how an entity is being used. In some cases the entity is not even being used. How the entity is being used can not be verified unless each action diagram that is listed as using the entity is checked out of the CSE. Access Gen identifies how the entity is being used in each procedure and has proved to very beneficial when performing analysis on any entity changes or in determining where certain entity actions may be taking place.
• The CSE does not have any built in functionality that allows browsing of action diagrams. The only access to server action diagrams is through the source datasets on the mainframe. There is no way to view client action diagrams unless they are checked out of the CSE. Using Access Gen we have immediate access to both the client and server action diagrams. This has been a major benefit when troubleshooting production problems and in performing analysis. The ability to rectify or at least confirm a production problem by accessing the code directly is greatly improved using Access Gen. Without Access Gen it may take a couple of hours to determine the problem just because the code has to be checked out of the CSE. Using Access Gen the code is available immediately.
• Access Gen allows us to compare objects from one model to another model. It displays their versions and when they were last updated in a model etc. This way you can see different versions of the objects and are able to see if an object has been changed. If it has, one is able to see exactly what has changed, when the change was made and who made the change. This is particularly useful for a model manager or developer and can be achieved within a few seconds rather than hours.
• In order to see where and what an object references and/or is referenced by, we have to run more than one report on the CSE. With Access Gen the object only has to be selected and it can be expanded to identify the other objects that it references. It provides all the information immediately and in one location. To gather this much information on the CSE takes multiple reports.
• When researching work requests, the tool allows a developer or analyst to view the logic that exists in production without needing to download a subset. When researching a problem, it usually takes looking through a string of objects to locate the problem, without the tool, this would mean multiple checkouts from the CSE. With the tool, we can simply display the logic as we need to see it. This not only saves time that would have been used to perform the multiple checkouts; it allows you to maintain your current train of thought and direction. This in turn results in a faster turnaround time on work requests.
• Data model changes that require RI triggers to be re-implemented are a time consuming manual task without Access Gen. A task that took an hour or two, took 10 minutes with CSE access. We were able to find the triggers that had to be regenerated along with the procedure steps and action blocks that needed to be re-linked.
• Access Gen allows an analyst to count the number of objects affected much easier. For example the estimate for WCE changes to the windows and dialog boxes done before the evaluation required an educated guess to the number of windows and dialog boxes needing to be changed. As a result of this guess being too low, we ran out of hours and had to issue an impact of change. Access Gen would help us to estimate much more accurately.

Summary

We feel that 10 developers using Access Gen would save at least 2 hours per week per developer. We also greatly improved our customer service response time and reduce the current frustration with the encyclopedia.