Endevor Reviews

We switched from a home grown Librarian based System to Endevor starting in 2009. The product provides good visibility of code changes, and change history. It provides good security options as well.

The biggest benefit we have gained from using this product is the decrease in deployment errors. With our old system, binds and new copies were done manually based on paperwork filled out by the programmer. Now all that is done through Endevor processors.

The biggest irritation I have is the footprint checking process. Once the footprints get out of sync it is hard to tell what the issue is and to fix it.

Support is quite good for this product, although it has become a little more time consuming lately. All calls now appear to go through a general service person first. I have always gotten attention the same day. Not always a fix or an answer that quick, but at least a response from a service tech letting me know they had the problem and were working on it.

The product is still being actively enhanced and there is a strong user community.

We cut implementation errors by around 99%. Less effort is required by developers to set up migrations and the moves are much easier and less prone to problems.

Endevor can be very rigid. When you install and set up your map which controls the way code moves between stages it is important to be sure it is like you are going to want it for the long hall. The map is complicated to change once code is in flight. Each stage is related to the next and this relationship can only be changed when elements are at specific points in the migration cycle.

We have been using this product since 2009.

The biggest issue we had was kick back from staff that didn't like change. We also picked an installer that had a set way of doing the job and so we have an install we don't like. I would strongly suggest that new users take time to understand the product and the different ways it can be set up instead of letting someone just decide for them.

No issues with stability at all.

No issues with scalability.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is also very good.

We had our own home grown solution that required constant maintenance and patching.

The internal setup is complex and rigid. Get it like you want it the first time. The actual product install is not complex.

We used a contract installer recommended to us by another company, not from CA. This company had a set way that they did the installs and we were not proficient enough with the product to object to some of the things that were done. I strongly suggest that new users take the time to understand the product BEFORE the install.

We did evaluate several products including IBM ClearCase and MKS.

Our company uses ROSCOE for it's primary development. Although ROSCOE and Endevor are owned by the same company, the ROSCOE interface for Endevor is many years out of date.

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.

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.

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.

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 use the product as a source manager and program manager. It helps in controlling the mainframe code and performing data migrations.

Endevor is easy to use.

The product’s implementation process is complicated and restrictive. It is difficult to find file programs and use a different tool for the setup as the compilation process is all locked up, at least in our implementation. We might switch to MySQL for the same reason.

We have been using Endevor for ten years. We use the latest version.

The product is stable, but it is not static as we are developing software.

We have 100 Endevor users in our organization. It is a very scalable product.

I use SCLM as well.

The initial setup process is complex with complicated programs. We have a primary technical executive and two support executives to handle the implementation.

We implement the product with the help of third-party vendors and our in-house staff.

The product is expensive.

I rate Endevor a seven out of ten. I wouldn’t recommend it to others. It could have better pricing and support strategies.

Managing source code artifacts. It controls who has access to the source code, it versions it, and it deploys it. It also presents it in a controlled environment. It has approval gates built in to the tool to allow different teams to sign off before a deploy.

It provides the business the level of governance it needs over the source code. We’re able to control the gold copy and we’re able to maintain versions, historical record, and control access.

I like the stability and CA’s responsiveness, but I haven’t used anything else, so it’s hard to judge. I don't have a frame of reference to know whether there may be something better.

It maintains a 99.999% uptime. It’s always been available and has always started. Upgrades are smooth and efficient. It’s a very mature, well-worn technology.

It’s so stable – it’s like the good child, you don’t really think about what it needs. I also manage the bad child, too.

We have used CA professional services to make modifications. It was fantastic – really helped some automations we were working on. They overcame the package shipping problem between separate data centers.

This is my only experience with mainframe software configuration management. There isn’t much competition in this space anyway.

Think about how it manages security of the assets and its governance properties.

• Version tracking
• Footprinting
• ACM
• Admin tools (build SCL)

Time-submitted packages allow for silent, off-hours installs into production.

I find the ISPF interface to be lacking. It seems like you have to navigate to a lot of different screens to work with the same element.

I have used this solution for 20+ years.

We did not have stability issues.

We did not have scalability issues.

On a scale of 1-10, I would say technical support is a 7. First-level of support often comes back with answers that are obviously incorrect or not relevant. Luckily, we don't have many issues.

We had Changeman on one of our mainframes. We migrated to Endevor for the cost savings and also for consistency in our SCM. Endevor was our choice between the two.

I find setup very straightforward. The biggest challenge we had when converting was replicating the compile options. The load module analyzer only looks at link options. It would be nice if it also looked at compile options.

I'm not involved with pricing or licensing.

We looked at Changeman.

I think it's the best SCM I've used and would definitely recommend it.