ZZUtils - A product of LEN CONSULTING LLCZZUtils

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Rapid Return on Investment

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.

Quantification

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

ZZTDOC creates softcopy documents for technical code walkthroughs.  These documents are formatted for ease of use.  A single document contains source code comparisons and sample reports for a set of related modules.  A title page provides immediate identification of the document's content and its author.  A table of contents and page headers allow for rapid location of individual reports within the document.  Source code changes are shaded to stand out from the unchanged text.

In addition to the 
ZZTDOC utility, the purchase of ZZUtils includes a checklist of over 50 items to look for during a code walkthrough.  It is intended to provide a starting point for a comprehensive, site -specific document which includes all shop coding standards.

Quantifiable Savings

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.

Migrations per month:
Manual effort:
Automated effort:
Saving:
ROI:
3 x 4 weeks
12 x 4 modules x .5 hours
12 x 10 minutes
22 hours x $50

12 walkthroughs
24 hours
2 hours
$1,100 monthly
5 months

Potential Savings

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.

Productivity Improvements

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.


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