Several ZZUtils component utilities, such as ZZVPARM, improve a developer's productivity by automating lengthy manual tasks. Components such as ZZADACMD offer potential savings by providing information that is not otherwise easily obtained. These productivity gains and potential savings may be difficult to quantify.
ZZTDOC offers appreciable, quantifiable savings while helping to improve developer and application performance.
It may be easy to demonstrate
how a productivity tool can assist your developers, but it may be quite difficult
to translate that assistance into dollar savings. Cost savings are
a function of the cost of the existing procedure, the cost of the new procedure,
and the frequency of the procedure. In many cases it is difficult to
estimate the cost of an existing manual procedure and, more often than not, no statistics are available for how frequently a specific procedure is used. For example, ZZVPARM
can create a local data area from a DDM in a matter of seconds. How
long would the same task take manually? That depends upon the length
of the DDM. How often do programmers need this functionality? That
depends upon the application and site standards.
The exception is the technical code walkthrough.
If, as it should be, the shop
standard is to hold a technical code walkthrough for each module promoted
to the production environment, then the frequency of this procedure should
be known, because it is standard practice to log and track all change-enhancements
and fixes.
ZZTDOC users
have confirmed that to create documents of the same quality through a manual
process would require, on average, half an hour of effort for each source module. A
walkthrough document comprised of ten modules would require five hours to
produce. ZZTDOC creates an identical document in approximately ten minutes - a saving of 95%.
How quickly ZZUtils
pays for itself depends upon the frequency of code walkthroughs. It
is common practice to schedule weekly migrations to the Production environment.
Each migration request corresponds to a prior code walkthrough.
Given
an average of three migrations per week, an average of four modules per walkthrough (a
mix of Natural, COBOL, JCL, and sample reports), and an estimate
of $50 as the hourly staff rate, the cost of ZZUtils would be recovered in five (5) months.
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ZZADACMD reports Adabas commands compiled within a Natural catalogued object. ZZADACMD may be executed on-line, selected for inclusion in a ZZTDOC
document on a module-by-module basis, or run in batch to report
an entire application. At one customer site, the batch report uncovered
a FIND ... SORTED BY statement in a Production application module. During
the two weeks following the discovery, the database "froze" three times attempting
to execute the FIND command, locking out all other users for approximately
an hour before Technical Support staff bounced Adabas to restore access.
The three hours of downtime would have been avoided if the ZZADACMD report had been acted upon immediately.
ZZUtils improves the productivity of your development staff by automating time-consuming manual processes. For example:
ZZLOCATE |
Search all application libraries in the current FUSER and display timestamp data for all occurrences of a module name. |
ZZSEARCH |
Create a report, as in ZZLOCATE, for a set of FUSERs. |
ZZVPARM |
Create a local data area from a DDM. |
A summary of all ZZUtils functions may be found on the Download page.
Return to the ZZUtils home page.
Natural and Adabas are registered trademarks of Software AG. |