Software Company Consolidates and Modernizes SCM with ISPW
Customer Company Size
SME
Product
- Compuware ISPW
Tech Stack
- IBM Source Configuration and Library Management (SCLM)
- Assembler
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Manufacturing System Automation
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
The customer is a software company that develops business applications and operating system utilities on the mainframe. The company has a small team of developers with decades of niche technical knowledge and skills. The company's mainframe SCM solution was a homegrown Assembler application built around IBM Source Configuration and Library Management (SCLM) for z/OS. The company was facing a challenge when the only employee who knew the intricate details of the company’s mainframe SCM solution announced his retirement. The company planned to hire a replacement for the retiring developer, but it quickly realized it would be unreasonable to train someone new to support an antiquated Assembler-SCLM tool that wasn’t core to the company’s business.
The Challenge
A software company faced a challenge when the only employee who knew the intricate details of the company’s mainframe SCM solution—a homegrown Assembler application built around IBM Source Configuration and Library Management (SCLM) for z/OS—announced his retirement. The company's development occurs on the mainframe, requiring a team with decades of niche technical knowledge and skills. However, the software development team is small, and the loss of even one developer significantly impacts productivity. The company planned to hire a replacement for the retiring developer, but it quickly realized it would be unreasonable to train someone new to support an antiquated Assembler-SCLM tool that wasn’t core to the company’s business. The Assembler-SCLM tool impeded the acceleration of application development and delivery, a crippling disadvantage in a digital age where the pace of a “dinosaur” has long been superseded by industry-disrupting Agile “unicorns.”
The Solution
The company scoured the SCM market for a singular tool before finding ISPW, an Agile SCM, release automation, and deployment automation solution. The company was enthusiastic about the features ISPW offered, but the decision to implement ISPW came after Compuware’s acquisition of the tool in January 2016. ISPW’s multiple development areas enable concurrent development. The company’s programmers would be able to work in parallel and improve collaboration through features like lifecycle management that shows multiple versions of code in flight, end-to-end tracking of every action that affects code running at any level, and an audit trail of all activities throughout the development lifecycle. With ISPW, developers can rollback some or all code changes at once and replace a current production program with a valid previous program version, something their Assembler-SCLM tool was limited in. In ISPW, production source is synchronized with rollback so versions always match. ISPW’s modern, intuitive web interface would make it easier for developers to view the status of all deploy requests and the environments into which code was deployed.
Operational Impact
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