From a development perspective, it allowed me to validate every line of my logic if necessary, most times in one pass. In other words, Xpediter allowed me to churn out quality code more quickly than I would have been able to without it. Better quality means less rework, so reduced support costs. Being able to deploy code faster means I could get more projects done, which translated in to an increase in revenue.
From a support perspective, Xpediter helps you to figure out where things are going awry without having to be an expert in the business function that is being performed.
Initial setup can be tricky in some cases. Also, there are some space limits that we would hit every now and then while processing internal tables, so we would have to decrease occurs clauses and re-test. These situations could have been related to how the shop installed Xpediter ... it might not be an issue with the tool itself.
I used Xpediter for about two-and-a-half years.
I wasn’t involved in the deployment or installation of the product, I just used it to troubleshoot programs.
I have not encountered any stability issues.
I have not encountered any scalability issues.
I never had to contact customer service.
Technical Support:I never had to contact technical support.
The previous solution was to add displays to programs and see what they told me. I went away from that method and went to Xpediter as I found myself making multiple passes to figure out what was going on. In other words, I’d add displays just to find out that I had to add displays to more code, not a good cycle to be caught up in.
Initial setup for a user was pretty straightforward, and that was without documentation. The biggest issue always revolved around the size and attributes of the DDIO file.
The product was already installed when I started working there, so I don’t have any insight on this.
I don’t have any solid numbers on this, but I can tell you that three people were able to write a financial accounting, posting, interest and service charging system in three months and it had VERY few technical errors from the mainframe perspective. My guess is this would have taken twice as long, or we would have had many more issues without using Xpediter.
I would say that if you are still caught up in an iterative troubleshooting mode, the value of the product is WELL worth the money, especially in complex environments. When I think about how much time is wasted in those iterative efforts (and from multiple people, testers, QA, project management, change management along with programming), I would say our missed opportunity cost would offset the annual cost of the product in about three months.
Yes, we evaluated other products but I will not mention which ones.
Don’t discount the value of the product, even if you feel your build cycles and support are ‘good’. There’s no reason to NOT see what Xpediter can do for your programming staff and projects.
