ISPW Demo/Training System Configuration

The ISPW Demo/Training system comes packaged with the ISPW software. It may or may not be set up at a customer’s site. This section gives examples of how it is used.

Change Cycle Paths

As illustrated in the following figure, the ISPW Demo/Training system has three paths or “circuits” to Production: 

• DEV1 to STG1 to QA to PRD
• DEV2 to STG2 to QA to PRD
• FIX to HLD to PRD.

DEV1, DEV2, and FIX are update levels, so modules may be edited only when they are at these levels, at the bottom of the change cycle.

In the Demo system, Approvals are required between some levels. Approvals may be done by Team Leaders, by QA staff, or by Operations. Approvals are entirely site-definable and may even vary between Applications.

Demo/Training System Change Cycle

ISPW Encompasses All Change Cycle Levels

An important point to reiterate is that ISPW is a development environment that includes the update level of the change cycle, as well as the Test and Production levels.

ISPW users are always in ISPW, as it invokes the tools IT staff need to do their jobs.

Demo System Libraries

Each of these Demo/Training system levels is defined to different datasets, which are all PDSs or PDSEs in the current Demo environment.

Change Cycle Libraries “Sparsely Populated”

Modules move from one PDS to another as they go through the change cycle. Except for the PRD level source and load libraries, which are fully populated, (i.e. they contain all the source and executables for every component), the other source and executable libraries in the change cycle are empty except for the modules in motion in the cycle.

In the preceding figure, modules would be updated at DEV1, DEV2 and/or FIX, but they may also exist in other change cycle levels as well.

Security

ISPW uses standard IBM RACF security, which is implemented via SAF. Demo/Training system users have update access to modules only in the DEMO system.

Demo/Training Modules and Roles

The Demo/Training system has types of modules:

• REXX execs (stored in CLIST libraries)
• COBOL programs and subroutines
• Copybooks
• JCL.

Module Names

Users are assigned specific sets of modules for their own use in the Demo/Training system. Typically, a user will be assigned a set of modules ending in the same number, for example, 15 or 27.

Feel free to make changes to modules to try different ISPW operations, or cause compile or link errors, and so on.

Demo System Roles

To make the demo system as realistic as possible, users can play different “roles”. These ISPW roles are:

• Developers
• Approvers
• Operations staff.

In a normal corporate environment, ISPW users would not be able to move modules all the way up to Production, as security and good practices would not allow this to happen. In the Demo/Training system however, users can take on different roles to Approve their own work, so the entire change cycle process can be seen.

The next section shows the simplest case of the steps through the ISPW change cycle.