Endevor Reviews

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.

Software changes and release management.

It makes production changes much easier to implement, and to recover if there are problems. It has saved us a lot of issues.

Versioning, you are able to track changes to code more easily.

Also, it's very flexible. A new technology comes along, this can be multiplied to handle the new technology quite easily.

Interfacing with some change control products that are not CA's, it's a little glitchy on the approvals of changes. It requires special needs for the users for approvals, so the user interface for approving changes could be better.

Stability is a nine out of 10.

Scalability is a seven out of 10.

Tech support is usually a nine or even a 10 out of 10.

I think we had a product that was being discontinued, and we were looking for a product to be able to handle the volume of source we had. We also wanted to be able to easily transition to the new product, one that would require minimal training.

It was pretty straightforward.

It's worth the value. The pricing is fairly good, justifiable for the return on investment.

Licensing is fairly simple, you don't need multiple licenses.

I think it's a good tool. There are similar products out there that you might want to get now with a GUI interface. Right now, this product is mostly green screen - we use the mainframe product - so I think it would be advantageous for other companies to use a GUI product.

The valuable features are definitely its customization facilities and its scalability for our organization. Those are the two biggest things from which we can leverage value.

We've got full auditability through the product and that's a huge thing for a financial organization to have in place just from one product. The great thing about the new features is that CA reacts directly to us. We demand new features as customers and they just build it right away. We wanted long names to be put into the product so we could store longer named file definitions and element definitions and that's being released right now. That was from a requirement. In a very short time, CA made a requirement into the real end game.

While CA is able to react to our requests for new features, I think the downside is they don’t use as much long, or medium term strategy anymore.

It is extremely stable software. We don't see it fail. Even with product upgrades it is solid. It has never failed in its history at the bank.

It is completely scalable as a solution. That is important to us. We've probably got one of the biggest implementations of Endevor as a CA customer and it scales completely to our requirements. It provides six terabytes of space. I don't think anybody else providing more space that.

I'm not sure because I didn't select CA as a vendor. I guess price, realistically, has a lot to do with the end solution of what you're actually choosing. Features and stability should be on the list, but realistically, price has to be in there as well.

You need a team of people to support this product. It's not a buy and forget product. You need a team of experienced personnel to support it and they'll gain that experience over time. It's not something you can just go out and buy and implement and have all of the functions and all of the features given to you straight away. You need the professionals behind it to actually do this.

We use it for source code management. We use it to basically keep our applications that we use day-to-day, month-to-month, and week-to-week, all up-to-date. We use it to move it through those areas and manage it for auditing purposes, like dev, QA, production, etc. Our developers use it to build code in those different stages and move it forward.

There are approvers which have to approve something before it can move from dev to test, then test to production. Therefore, it makes it very seamless and easy to trace. Not only that, but it is easy to make sure nothing is getting to a place that it should not, when it should not. For example, being able to prevent things moving up the chain, things moving back, or things being edited when they should not is huge for us. So it has been a great benefit.

The traceability and the footprint that it creates for every element and every piece of code that it is put in. Being able to track who did what and when is huge for us because auditors are going to come back, especially being a financial company, and say, "Why was this touched, and when?" 

You can trace it back to exactly who did anything and what it was connected to, based on the notes and all the information included with it. 

The graphical user interface. It would be a big tool to change (but needed), just because as the workforce kind of ages and retires, the younger generation is not as familiar with mainframe and looking at a green screen is not really a huge selling point to them. So, adding an updated graphical user interface and making it a little bit more like Eclipse, also making it more widespread, making it easier to install, and getting it setup, would be great. 

Otherwise, Endevor does what it needs to do and it is hard to say that it needs any kind of massive change because of its great scalability, and because of its great availability. It does what it needs to do, so it is hard to say anything needs to change massively.

So far, so good. We would love to get upgraded to 18, which has not happened. However, versions 16 and 17 have worked great. 

As far as stability, we have had minor issues. When we have minor issues, CA is great to jump out and help us. 

It is great. One of our systems has 21,000 elements, so you are talking about a ton of modules. You put it on the mainframe that has very high availability, and it just makes it great, because you can constantly use it and you can keep building as long as you have the space for it. Our storage and available are there, and as long as you have the storage availability you can keep going to build it as big as you want. You do not see any drop off as far as speed or the utilities in the system. None of that changes no matter how many elements you have, whether it is one or 21,000. 

This is part of the reason I work on Endevor. It is completely different than other tools I have used. It is easy to use and is very intuitive to where you can sit there and it will keep growing, but it does not change. You do not have to learn a new thing, because you have gotten too big or anything like that, thus I really enjoy it.

Their customer service is second to none. From what we have seen. I have a couple of them that I can reach out to directly. They provide instant feedback on how to fix our problems and how to get to what we need done.

Since I have been there, we did not have anything before that, but it makes it so it is not chaos, where anybody can go in anytime. 

I have been involved with the initial setup of version 18. I was not involved with the initial onboarding of Endevor. With version 18, so far, so good. There have been a couple stumbling blocks just setting up the different check boxes that you have to check to get certain features applied. But even then, if you go through the documentation or you reach out to customer service, you can get those pretty quick and easy. 

There are a few steps along the way that we stumbled on, but they were quick fixes and they were pretty minor.

I would recommend the product. It is very easy to use. It is great as far as what it does. Once you have learned it and figured it out, it is right there as one of the best products you can get. 

We use it for version control in the mainframe area.

It's been great. To be honest, we use GitHub for enterprise for the distributed world, and we use SCM for the mainframe world. So far, I've looked around as well. I've not seen a computer that's close to Endevor in terms of performance, scalability and capability.

On a day to day basis, it's all about managing my operations without any downtime. The tool has done a good job of want I want it to do, and it's a very stable tool. I think it's doing a good job.

• Automated build
• Quick Edit option
• Utilities for continuous integration

I think the main focus should be the continuous delivery aspects. How can I have a single view of the distributed core and the mainframe core, coming together in one wholesome, holistic experience?

Stability is great. Since it's running on the mainframe I think CA has done a really good job of keeping the availability at more than "three nines." As well, whenever there is any support issue I think that CA is really good, and it gets resolved within 24 hours.

Regarding scalability, we started off when we were very, very small. We've been using it for more than seven or eight years, and the mainframe size has increased but Endevor has done a good job of keeping up with it.

For the straightforward questions I think that they do a good job of getting back within 24 hours. For the tricky ones, whenever it comes to upgrades or things like that, they definitely take 48 to 72 hours. The response time is slower, but the good thing is they come back with the right answers, and that's what is important.

I started managing about it four years back and we've gone through many upgrades and renewals, but I was not part of the initial set up.

If you're upgrading more than one version, there is a difference. Typically, if you upgrade frequently, it's better. But if you're doing multiple jumps then I would say getting CA's support would be helpful, as the underlying architecture could have changed and things could go south. So it is important to involve CA support or at least to have them review the plan.

I give it an eight out of 10, and the reason I am cutting the two points is that I want it to be a little more lightweight in terms of continuous delivery.

If you're looking for a version control system for mainframe, I don't think you should even have a second thought of not trying at least trying out Endevor. I'm sure you won't be disappointed. At the same time, it has all the capabilities that are required to take your company into the continuous delivery ecosystem. That's why I think you should definitely give it a shot.

Endevor was brought in because we wanted to stop developers from making production changes in production. It’s enabled us to find a way to make sure the code stays in one area, and to make it secure. Therefore they’re not allowed to do that anymore. It’s a change management tool and that’s the way we use it.

They’ve got little things that I would like to see. It’s more for the administrative side as opposed to the developer who uses Endevor. Since I’m one of the administrators, I'd like to be able to use wildcards a little more often when I’m querying things.

It’s very stable. We don’t have any issues. Whenever we have an issue, we can call them up and say, “Hey, we got a problem.” They’ll fix it right away.

It's very scalable. They’re becoming more and more scalable every day because a lot of people are trying to get rid of the mainframe, not realizing that it’s still just a giant server and it can be used for that. It holds more data, and runs things faster.

Our upgrade plans: the plan is to upgrade. The more and more systems you add to it, and the fact that it handles other things that it never used to do that people wouldn't even think of it doing. It does grow with you and you can keep going with it.

It’s great. We’ve never had a problem. I would recommend that anybody, if you’ve got one of their tools, join one of the user groups because they do have input on the way things are done and any changes you need, they’re willing to listen and to help you out should you have a problem.

It’s straightforward as long as you know the mainframe. If you don’t know the mainframe, they’ve gotten better with the instructions. It’s more like a distributed side. They’ve gotten a lot better, so it’s a lot easier. They’ve got little things that I would like to see. It’s more for the administrative side as opposed to the developer who uses Endevor.

It's important for us that it actually handles the job that we need it to, that it actually covers everything for Endevor. We needed to make sure that we can actually put security in there so not everybody can touch anybody else’s code or anything like that and that it does incorporate the other CA tools that we use going forward.

I’d probably give it a ten because I’ve used it for fifteen years. I love it. The developers now love it, so it’s all good.

I highly recommend for current users to keep it and keep going forward with it because it is very useful, the user group is great. You can get lots of help from everybody out there.

We're using Endevor for application development.

Endevor ensures the source code is deployed to production in an accurate way.

The source integrity is the most valuable feature.

Concurrent development has room for improvement.

The cost of the solution has room for improvement. 

The initial setup can be less complex and has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for thirty-two years.

I give the stability a ten out of ten.

I give the scalability a ten out of ten.

We have 50 people using the solution in our organization.

The initial setup is a bit complex. Two people are required for the deployment.

We have seen a return on investment.

The solution is very expensive.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

Source control management.

It performs well.

It's very controlled. I can't say that it improves, the way our company functions. 

It's not so much that it, by itself, isn't beneficial, but that maybe the way we use it is not necessarily great.

There are lots of restrictions and it's difficult to move things through the process and to get things elevated. And then we'd have to do some crazy process to get a CCID created and you've got to submit a request here, and then you've got to have this and that.

We've got this other process, if you generate a package and then you forgot an item, then you have to add to it. We have to get someone else to reset your package and you've got to submit a different request and get someone to reset the package. It's just painful, instead of having the users have the control over what they're doing, and over that process.

• Version control 
• Being able to compare versions
• Being able to see the difference in the history

Learning the tool for the first time was extremely difficult, and it could be because of all the other processes we had around it. But knowing you can do these things in batch, you can do things in the foreground or online mode, and then these, you have to have a package for. There are these rules, and some of the concepts inside the tool are not clear, like what is the CCID? Why do I have to have one? What is that? And how is it used? As a developer, it's not important to me - I don't know what a CCID is, and I don't care - but apparently it's important to someone.

It seems extremely stable.

It seems scalable. I've never encountered any slowness. It seems that many, many users could use it without a problem.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• that the tool meet your needs
• that it have the features and functions that you're looking for.

CA Endevor is better than not having any source control management, some kind of source control tools.