Endevor Reviews

It is a tool the mainframe programmers use to do their work. If they need to make a change to a program, they go into Endevor and they check out a copy of the program. Then, they make their changes and check it back into Endeavor, and it gets built or compiled into whatever the language is. When they want to move a copy of it to QA for testing, they use Endevor to do that. Also, when it is time to go into production, they use Endevor to do that. The programmers do all their work through Endevor, and it is their bridge between development and production. 

The benefits are that we backup people's source code for them. They do not have to worry about losing it because Endevor keeps it for them, all kinds of previous versions. Endevor keeps track of everything that auditors need. That is a big thing. Any question that an auditor has about our processes and approvals is all stored in Endevor. We can give them reports and it makes them happy, especially when you work for a bank. 

What I like about Endevor personally is it can be very flexible, as far as how you use it. You can make it do nearly anything, but in really clever ways. It is very versatile. You can really customize it for your own shop pretty extensively, pretty easily. 

It may seem a little abstract, but when somebody approves an Endevor package, if they are able to approve, and let us say there's four different approvals that are needed. If they have the ability to approve at four different levels, and if they check off to approve the package it will approve all the way through. If I would like the person to be able to approve at one level. It doesn't matter which one it is, but they only can choose one thing, then somebody else has to do the other approvals. There is no way around it. I spent an entire day trying really hard once to figure out how to do that. In a shorter sentence, the ability to restrict one approval per approval level would be a big deal for us. 

Sometimes finding errors and output can be difficult because it spits out so many messages that it is hard to figure out which ones are the ones you need to look at and what flow did it actually take through the processor is what they call them. There are a lot of if-then-elses, sometimes it is hard to figure out which if-then-elses it actually did. When you can turn on what they call a trace, but if somebody asks you a question you want to just say, "Which one ran and which one failed?" That's not always easy. That could be a little easier. 

It is very stable. We have no problems.

One thing that is great about CA is that they worked with really big companies for a long time. We have no problems with scalability. It is excellent.

I have only ever opened one case as I am relatively new with the company, but they got right back to me and answered my question quickly. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

There's really only two mainframe tools that do this, Endevor and something called ChangeMan. I used to support ChangeMan. It is good, but it is a lot simpler. If I was talking to somebody, I might point out the flexibility of the Endevor implementation and how you can do so many different things in really clever ways. 

Valuable features of Endevor include the ability to see all code modifications and a smooth transition into production.

Our organization now has standardized change management processes for implementation into production. With our old process, any number of people could have put code into production, but now Endevor is the only user who can touch production.

The parts of Endevor which we use do not need improving as they work very well.

Endevor offers many flexible processing options, but our organization does not use the product’s capabilities to their fullest potential. The processing options in our shop work quite well and are easy to understand.

Conversion to Endevor began about nine years ago.

I have not encountered any stability issues. Each version upgrade of Endevor has been stable.

As Endevor moves through the stages toward production, disk space can become an issue. PDSE structures resolve space issues.

Endevor technical support is definitely a 10/10. I have few issues with Endevor which require technical support. However, when I do submit an issue or question, response is immediate.

Our previous solution was an in-house developed system. The switch to Endevor was made because the in-house developed system was cumbersome to use and was lacking accountability.

The initial Endevor setup was very straightforward. After setting up the system and subsystem information within Endevor, source code is ported into Endevor through a batch process. Endevor keeps track of components for each element, so one part does not move into production without the other parts.

I’m not sure if other options were evaluated. Endevor had already been selected by the time I joined the team.

Do not bring the current process into Endevor. Consider moving forward using standard methodology, and make the move to Endevor a priority project.

It’s a very nice product and runs without errors.

It has performed very well. We use it for our CSS mainframe development.

It was really done because of an audit issue, which has since been cleared. It works very well for the organization and does what it needs to do. The developers do not have any complaints at the moment.

It was an easy install. 

I do most of the work with the processors now. Since it was all set up, it pretty much runs itself now. 

I know there is capabilities for web enablement to use with Eclipse, but we have not gone down that road any at all.

Stability has been really good. I have actually never had to open an issue or report an issue since I have been running it.

The scalability is real good. Our environment is not real large, but it works well for what we do. 

It has been awhile since I used the technical support. I have no problems at all with them.

The initial setup was easily understood as far as the concept. The setup was difficult. We did need technical services initially, but I spent very little time in having to do anything with it. 

We had help from CA Services. They were a great help. We have not needed their services since. 

It does exactly what it needs to do. Just make sure if you are going to license, ensure you license the right features.

My understanding is that Endever is one of the better software exchange management systems out there. I don't think people should really look at anything else. 

It does exactly what we need it to do. It has worked well for us because we've had it now for about five years. 

I am using Endevor for a software controller.

The most valuable feature of Endevor is the software controller.

Endevor can improve parallel development.

I have been using Endevor for seven years. 

I rate the stability of Endevor an eight out of ten.

We have approximately 200 people using the solution.

I rate the scalability of Endevor an eight out of ten.

I used the support, but the solution is stable and did not use them often.

The initial setup of Endevor is of a medium difficulty.

I rate Endevor an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for the solution is management, version control, process, or building management. Additionally, we deploy the solution on local storage.

We find the robustness of the product and the process management process valuable.

The solution is very good and prevalent in larger organizations, but the solution can be improved by integrating more smoothly with the open world.

We have been using the solution for approximately one year and are currently on version 18.

The solution is stable. I rate it a ten out of ten. There is rarely any downtime from the product because of the infrastructure of the software. The sites could make a mistake but not the product.

The solution is scalable. It allows you to start with a pilot of three or four users and easily increase it to 1000 or 2000 users to even millions of users. There are no restrictions on how big it gets. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

I rate technical support a ten out of ten. They have a short turnaround of about a day to get issues rectified. It's one of the best supportive products that I know.

Positive

We did not use any other solutions, but we considered Endevor's most significant competitor at the time ISPW.

I rate the initial setup a five out of ten. When you come into sites with 5,000 files, you integrate them into the package. So you have to do a lot of analysis, which is time-consuming. These are external to the product and take many months to implement. 

The first thing is to understand how all the source management is going on in the organization and what processes are needed to build all those sources. Then deciding who will deploy the objects and planning considerations. Once all the planning is done, you have to go through the plan, which takes many months as it is best to review it in chunks. Then, you can do a pilot, but after the pilot, the procedure takes many months.

We implemented the solution in-house, and I have personally implemented approximately 15 of these solutions.

The return from Endevor is clear. Firstly, all of the process management is automated. Users do not have to be concerned about how to build out of their source. It completely masks the unit and there are no mistakes. The product is built, so everything is automatic. The source management is excellent because it gives you versioning so you can easily go back to an old version, which is also very important for the users. It isolates between developed production permits, which provides flexibility and security for the user and provides protection to prevent unauthorized access by source users. So users of one team cannot see the source of another group. For example, mask the payroll source from the entire organization. Hence, all of these things provide a considerable return because without a sound source management system, if you have hundreds of users and hundreds of thousands of files, you have a colossal mess on every site that doesn't have it. Therefore this solution provides order as it is an excellent container to manage this tremendous asset of financial institutions with over one billion dollars.

The solution is very expensive. There have been negotiations between our customers and Broadcom, the product owner. It also depends on the basket of products they have from Broadcom. Sometimes we use it because the licensing costs are bundled in with many others. It is an expensive product.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. The solution is good, but since it was developed over 50 years ago, the open world hasn't been taken into account. The solution can be improved by integrating it with current-day changes.

We use it to move our mainframe code through development to production. From a release perspective, my team oversees it, and we help manage that. 

It helps us control what changes we are putting into production. From an audit perspective, just making sure everything is all in one place.

With the newer version, you can do a lot of the automation that you could not do in the past where you had to do manual stuff. Now, we are getting into automation, which makes my life a whole lot easier.

It is interesting because we are just starting to employ some of the new features. We just put a new version in last weekend. 

I would like to see more of automation pieces. I think that is going to be where we need to go to make things faster to get to our customers.

It is the Cadillac of that tool. There is no other tool that matches it on the market today. It is the best, and it is very stable. It has never gone down.

It is very easy to work with, depending on how much you want to employ and how little you want to employ the product. As far as what you run through it, it can be little to huge, no problem. It can manage it.

I have not used the technical support.

There was nothing else on the market and we had to start managing our mainframe applications. This was the best way to do it.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

IBM. We chose CA because it was the Cadillac tool.

CA is the one that sets the pace for everybody else to follow. We have never had any problems with the tool.

Definitely take a look at it. You can look at the other tools that are out there, but I do not think you are going to find anything better. Also CA's reputation, they back their product 100%.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The fact that they are there when I need them. CA is definitely that.

One of Endevor's most valuable features is the ability to have your source in a repository that keeps track of all of your versions. It also has your ACMQ, which allows you to keep track of your input and output components. It has everything in it that you need for auditors: who asked for the change, when the change moved up, all the different stages, and where the approvals are. So, when we have auditors come in, we can trace it from production all the way down through the development, and the changes that we made at a line level.

When we first brought Endevor in, we had a lot of issues with audits. We had Librarian. We had Panvalet. When we brought Endevor in, almost 18-20 years ago, the auditing issues went down dramatically, once we had everyone into Endevor, using it, and we had everything turned on. Now, when we have audits, they go through smoothly. They barely ask us any questions because we can prove the changes all the way up through production, and there's no issue with having to come back for information later.

Right now, we're looking at moving into DevOps, so I'm glad to see that CA has started DevOps on the mainframe. We're looking at using the Eclipse user interface, which will make it easier to move off of ISPF, and we're looking at possibly using Application Lifecycle Conductor. Endevor plugs into that so that we can use more of a pipeline for DevOps and for agile processing; get the pipeline in place so that we can trigger off and go to tools such as JIRA, Jenkins, and still be connected to the mainframe so our projects are all in one.

There is one feature, the sandbox feature, that allows you to virtually create environments for developments and then, once your project is done, those environments go away as you move up through the lifecycle. You can always build new environments.

That's a very good feature, but there are pieces of it that make it difficult to use for my company because of the way we have our data set up. There are some features in there I would like to see improved.

The Sandbox feature was added a few years ago and would be very helpful, but there are several companies that cannot use the feature due to the design. The Sandbox feature reuses the Subsystem field as an identifier for the sandbox then returns the modules back to the original subsystem when done. However there is no mechanism to save the old subsystem field at the module level, so only modules from one subsystem can go into a sandbox. That’s great for standalone or simple applications.
My company uses object oriented code with several layers, so one application may use many subsystems. Without the ability to map the modules back to their original subsystems we cannot use the sandbox feature. It would have worked well if a new field was introduced for the sandbox name instead of using the subsystem. Perhaps a new field or table could be added that would save the old subsystem so it could be replaced when the modules move out of the sandbox.

Currently the only solution is to continue creating environments for use with agile development which is a maintenance nightmare, or ask the application teams to redesign their software so it is contained within their own applications. This is not an option. So we’re going with the maintenance nightmare. I’ve tried designing a solution around the sandbox feature but it will be just as complicated as writing my own solution.

We have had this product for 18-20 years.

Endevor's very stable. We haven't had any issues with it going down. It's on the mainframe, so there really are no issues with stability.

We have five sysplexes. We've increased the number of LPARs. We've increased the number of business units; the lines of code. Everything is increased and we've automated moving things to production, so it really, it scales very well. We've had no issues with that.

We've used technical support several times, when they come out with new features. If we have issues with the features, or we're trying to figure out how we can use them best, we call technical support. Technical support has been great. They point us to the documentation; they'll help us with any issues; they work through everything very quickly.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I was a developer at that point, so I worked with Endevor from the other side.

Later on, I came in as the technical lead on Endevor. At that point, I was involved in cleaning up and streamlining what we had in our Endevor implementation.

The upgrade processes have changed over the years. The upgrade process is very easy now. It's an easy download and then we just have to do our testing. Rolling it out to the users is very simple.

Make sure you involve the technical people from CA on your design. When you bring your tools in, make sure you tell them what you're trying to solve, so they can help you design it correctly the first time, because once you get it in, it's difficult to change the way your design is without disrupting your business.

I haven't seen a perfect product, mostly because the products are usually very good in mainframe or distributed. I haven't seen a product that's really good in both. If it were good in both the mainframe and distributed source code, I would give it a perfect rating.

The security component of CA Endevor enables you to lock down the source code. It's very important for the source code be secure in a Fortune 500 company. Once you lock it down, you must belong to a specified group to access it. From there, you can view it, you can’t edit or update it. You can look at the source code, but you can't modify it.

I also use CA Endevor to migrate JCL and PARMs from my distributor jobs, which I use for SAP Finance Arm software. I use C7 Scheduler to run batch jobs. For those batch jobs, I use Endevor to migrate the JCL and PARMs. So Endevor is my source code that enables me to bring the JCL and PARMs from AD to ST to QA to production. I create the JCL and PARMs from cycle one; and I migrate all the way up to production. Endevor controls all of this.

For most companies, securing the source code is absolutely essential.

• I would like to see it used for Hadoop, which is really huge now. I would like to see it integrated with that concept.
• It's primarily a mainframe product, but I would love it be more scalable outside of the mainframe, such as on Windows and Unix platforms.
• Durability

CA Endevor is a very scalable product. It's scalable in the sense that I use it for all my distributed scheduling, Java batch, SAP, and mainframe jobs. So three platforms use CA Endevor for JCL control and migration.

Technical support was excellent.

Endevor has always been our source code. The support they provide for their products is bar none: excellent. If we have any problems with the product, CA support is always there for us. They're always talking to us about enhancing their products as well.

Give CA and their products a try.