Endevor Reviews

We use the basic feature set of Endevor to control and track all of the sales operations within our company. 

It is a very good product that allows safe management of the individual components. The tools are specifically designed for mainframe environments, providing features tailored to the unique requirements of the systems, ensuring there are no mistakes.

We use it to control the source code versioning, implementation, generation, automation; pretty much anything that is source code on the mainframe. We manage COBOL assembler, we manage pretty much any mainframe language there is.

On the CA side, where we're doing the mainframe, our automation, our development implementations are all automated, which is a huge amount of time savings. That's a big one.

Even just in the last year or so, we had a need to start using a CICS web services, and mesh them in with some distributed functions on an enterprise service bus. We put the web services into Endevor and we manage that way now. That was a new code, a new code requirement, a new challenge.

The solution guarantees the correspondence of the source and executable code (integrity) as well as automates the compilation processes. It also has other uses, such as automatic customization of JCLs/PROCs, and validation of standard names in PGMs, PROCs, JCL, PARM, etc.

It offers a single package of changes for mainframe and distributed and has reversal contingency and DRP.

There is a generation of environments to enable different stages of development and on-demand (DESA, UAT, and CRVL - Pre-production).

It offers security and audit of changes in information assets (software).

It is a mature company in information asset management. The solution helps improve:

• Timely environment deployment speed in response to business demand
• Control and monitoring of developed software
• Custody, classification of inventory 
• Compliance with standards of internal naming for programs, PARMs, etc
• Automation at various levels (program refresh, notifications, JCL and PROC customizations and integration
• The granularity of security and audit records
• DevOps implementation and integrations
• Compliance

I think some of the most valuable things with Endevor, as far as the build process, before we had Endevor, everyone had their own way of building an application. With Endevor it's very, very standardized. Once an application is built one time through Endevor, there next time you go to build the application again it works exactly the same way. It's very repeatable and very reliable. That's a huge part of it. It's used to for managing source code and executables throughout the entire software life cycle.

Some of the other benefits are the security that goes along with Endevor, the only way that you'd be able to update the output executable in the source code in Endevor would be to go through the product and use the product to do it. You really can't bypass the security and go around the product. You have a very, very tight source code to executable synchronization. They're linked together. I can go out to a load library and be able to go back to the source code that made up the executable very, very quickly. Very, very important, and the auditors very much love the product because it really satisfies a lot of the auditor requirements we have at our company.

Primary use case would be that our application developers use Endevor for managing their mainframe software. They take their source code and they add it in to Endevor, and Endevor translates that source code into an output executable, and then from there it would get deployed to the various development areas, QA areas, and then finally to production.

I think the most valuable features are the automatic building from the source code to the executable, and the way Endevor migrates the executables through the software lifecycle. I'm looking at it at more from a company perspective, from Aetna's perspective, that's the big benefit there.

And as far as for me, because I'm an Endevor administrator, I actually have to use Endevor to administer Endevor, so I use it almost in the way our customers use it. It's a cool product. Very robust, very solid.

The most valuable features are its security and its inability to not lose anything. We've been using it for 10 years at this company, and I used it previously for 17 years and I have never lost an element.

The way we have it implemented it, the developers really don't have to “work to make it work”. For example, they can take a COBOL program, hand it to Endevor, and the tool takes it, compiles it, and does everything it needs to do with it. They don't have to do any interactive work.

Software configuration management.

It has ensured that we can prove that what someone put into production is exactly what's in there. 

It also puts all our source in one product. We know where to go to gather all our source code and which source is associated with which executable. It's a one-stop-shop, one place to go for everything.

The developers can very easily see what has changed on a particular piece of source code or a program, and others can look at that as well so they can coordinate their changes. It makes it much easier to promote a piece of code up to production.

Before implementing this solution, nobody knew where all the source code was. It was kept in individuals' own libraries. We couldn't know for sure that a piece of source was the same source that was the executable running in production. There was no real way to tell which source created which executable, and that was the case for all the executables in production. When we went to Endevor, it was very easy to say, "Okay, this piece of code created that executable." It made it much easier to know for sure what we had in production.

I use it on a daily basis as an administrator. It performs fairly well and has for 20-plus years.

It is the standardized tool for all of mainframe development. In the past, it is a big improvement over just using standard homegrown utilities. Having something that is out-of-the-box that you can customize to suit your organization's needs is huge.