Endevor Reviews

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.

The biggest feature is that it protects the source and it associates the source with the executable. 

Endevor footprinting and ship are also big features.

One feature of Endevor is its Backout feature. If there is a problem, it can back out the executables. The only problem with that is that it will not back out the source in Endevor. For example, you can do a back out and it will back out the executable to the previous version, but it doesn't back out the source version in Endevor. It would make it much better if when you did a back out of Endevor, it would back out both the source and the executable and keep them in sync. Right now, if you do a back out and you leave it out, you have to sync the source code back in Endevor. That can be a challenge.

I'd rate the stability a nine out of 10. Obviously, every software product has issues from time to time, but whenever we've had issues, we've been able to work with CA to resolve them. I haven't found an occasion where we had problems with the product and we couldn't rectify them, working with CA.

I'd would say scalability is, again, a nine out of 10. I haven't found that Endevor couldn't handle large amounts of software or large amounts of activity going through it. The scalability with Endevor has always been very good.

Tech support rates a nine out of 10. Any time we've had issues with Endevor, no matter which place I worked at, tech support has always been very knowledgeable, very helpful and, most of the time, we've been able to resolve problems very quickly.

I've used other products in the past, but they weren't as feature-rich as Endevor. They didn't have all the advantages that Endevor has for source code management. I haven't found a product yet that could compete with Endevor, as far as source code management is concerned.

The initial setup depends on the shop. Some instances it can be very straightforward to set up, while in another shop, depending on what type of source code they have or what type of procedures they have to get code into production, it can get complicated. I haven't seen anything that Endevor couldn't handle. I haven't found an issue anywhere where Endevor couldn't handle a piece of source code or the way a piece of source code is built.

When we did purchase Endevor, which was quite awhile ago, there were products such as Pandalay and Librarian, but they really didn't compare, apples to apples, with Endevor. Endevor could do so much more. Currently, there are other products out there, but I haven't been involved recently in comparing Endevor with these other tools. But back when we did get Endevor, it was by far the better tool, so it was an easy choice.

Keep it as simple as possible. When you're implementing the product, any errors you make are only magnified as you go further down the line and keep on adding more and more applications to Endevor. My main advice would be, don't overthink the implementation. Try to make the implementation as simple and straightforward as possible and then build on that.

I've been using Endevor for many years, in many different shops, in many different situations. I've found Computer Associates to be very supportive. Their tech support is excellent. They constantly improve the product, which is great. They didn't just throw the product out there and then let it sit. They are constantly upgrading the product and making sure it is top-notch.

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.

Application software management for multi-client applications.

As an outsourcer, in some cases software is maintained in-house, then distributed to clients.

Consistent, repeatable processes, and the automation that we have built take away much of the human error aspect.

Also, we have been able to replicate entire SDLCs for new clients and have them loaded and ready to use Endevor in as little as one week. This was possible with the use of Endevor variables within the processors, so that a single processor was able to function for multiple systems across the entire SDLC.

The history logging (who, what, when). It's so easy to pass an audit when the facts are clear.

More audit capability when it comes to changes to settings that are made by administrators, as many of these are done through the panels and are therefore not logged as an action against a configuration item. 

Also, more flexibility for package approvals. Some new features are coming, but there will always be someone that needs something just a little different. Having the ability to choose approval order/approval disqualification in any combination, and defined at a stage level so that rules can be different, according to the location of the SDLC.

No issues with stability. Small bugs from time to time, but never really anything that kept the product from performing its main objective of software management.

No issues with scalability.

Great.

Straightforward in terms of the SDLC, but complex in the way the processors were initially built. A simple single stream of development made it easy to follow the development lifecycle.

The approach of writing a single set of Endevor processors to work across multiple instances of the application (separate systems) made the processors fairly complex, but once you understand them, they are so powerful.

At my original site (in 1989) there were other products evaluated, but I cannot recall the names as they did not stand the test of time.

My original entry to Endevor was the realization of the need for proper application software management. At that time there was the need for software management due to the up and coming Y2K issues. Beyond that, anyone who knew anything about application code knew that software management was high on the requirements list.

It’s a great product, but take the time to define what you need from it before you start doing anything. I recall there was a five-day planning and design that CA would assist with. That is a valuable time for gaining CA staff insights on best practices, and helping you "get it right."

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.

I like it because it customizable, and it's rock steady, it's a very robust and mature product. Plus I love the audit trail.

If you had asked me this 10 years ago I would have had some good answers, but they pretty well addressed everything. They've got plug-ins now to run it through Eclipse, they've got a lot of APIs, they handle UNIX files. I can't really think of any serious lack that they haven't addressed. It's a mature product, and its really stable.

Stability is a 10 out of 10.

Scalability is a 10 out of 10. For example, where I'm at now we manage about 15,000 pieces of code. In my previous job, where we actually used Endevor as well, we managed over 200,000 pieces of code. So you can see it's fairly scalable. 

I think we've only had to call them about three times in the last 20 years, and that was really more or less searching for answers, not a product issue. And they're always more than happy to help. They do great work.

Back in the day, it was just hard to manage multiple code streams; concurrent development I guess is what it was really. We needed to be able to manage that in a rational manner and automate it, so that's really why Endevor was picked. Also, CA was the market leader and they had the pretty much best product, after we went through all the due diligence.

We used to use a homegrown, user-friendly, in-house program but Endevor was an industry standard. We didn't use a competing product because this in-house program wasn't a product.

I think it's a pretty simple setup.

It's competitively priced and, as far as I know, it's just an enterprise license. We have found it is worth the money. Right now, I'm really not even involved in the pricing of the product here at this shop, but in previous shops we've always found it was worth the money.

I would say if you want a mainframe - any kind of mainframe - solution, or for software control management go for it. CA has good products. They're an industry standard in a lot of ways.

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.

We use it to update our production libraries.

We pull in the production version, Endevor creates the test version, we make our changes in the test version, and then we promote it out with Endevor to production.

It has improved our security.

• The fact that it's secure, that it creates security for all the data in those libraries.
• The audit trail, it tracks who makes the changes.

It does what I need it to do.

If there was anything, I would say there are a lot of screens in it. The process for moving out my other solutions, it could be more convenient. There are a lot of steps to go through and a lot of screens to go through to get it accomplished. So, if there was something for improving it, then maybe minimizing the amount of work it takes to go through.

It's very stable.

I just use it, so I'm not sure. I know the features that I use, but there are a lot more features to it that I don't use.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but those who were never complained. It's not considered one of the more complex products. They do the updates and I've never heard any complaints.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are 

• customer service
• ease of installation
• good documentation
• usability
• scalability.

And CA covers that, as far as I'm concerned.

I never give it a 10 out of 10, because there's always room for improvement. I'd go with an eight. It works, and does its job, and I've never heard any complaints for improvements in this product.

I don't know the competition, I don't know if there's anything better, but Endevor is a solid product. It is stable. 

We use it to migrate our software from the different environments of development and QA, and then QA to production.

It performs pretty well. I like it.

It's good because a lot of time you can keep the history tracking, so I can go back and I can see what the software looked like before and after, what was changed and what was moved.

It's the audit-level tracking. If something has gone wrong I can go back and figure out what happened, who did it.

Being able to go back through and see the history of changes that were migrated, who got migrated. And being able to see data migration has occurred.

Some of the things that we have talked about are trying to move towards Agile, and trying to map back. If I'm migrating once in a code that maybe solves multiple projects, or multiple user stories, or features. Being able to try and do that one-to-many; because right now we're just doing one-to-one.

If it were able to help us map back that code to basically what initially was running, that would help, because sometimes it can be multiples, I can install one release of a product that may have multiple originating.

It seems to be pretty stable.

It seems to be scalable. I don't know that we've tested any limits on it, but it appears to be.

It's been so long that I don't know what the previous solution was, but the switch was because we were trying to get it all consolidated, because we were in multiple places.

It was complex just from a matter of getting everything set up initially and making sure all our parameters were set properly. So it was about us getting everything there the first time. Because when you've got code everywhere, and you're trying to get it in one place, it can sometimes be a challenge just to find it all and get it there.

The most important criteria in selecting a vendor are

• stability of the product
• the company.

We like to hear from other customers that have used it. What were your experiences with it? The software, the vendor not being responsive.

I would rate it a solid eight out of 10, because it is stable, it serves the need that we have now. However, I don't know if it's serving where we are going with the Agile.

It seems to be a solid company, they're good and responsive. It's just a matter of making sure you know where all your software resides today, to get it all there.

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.

It standardizes the processing of all the development. Everything gets produced in a constant and consistent manner.

The flexibility, because I know a lot of the competition pigeonholes you into definitions and character limitations, and Endevor is wide open. You can define it as broadly or as narrowly as you want.

I do not know that there is much more that they can do on the mainframe side. They need to ditch the Eclipse plugin and just make the development environment for Z the standard Eclipse interface.

It is still kind of behind the times. It needs to catch up with all the millennials that want a distributed look and feel.

No downtime, and it has been around for 30 years. I think it has got another 30 to go. So, it is doing really well.

It is very scalable. You can use it in a small shop. I have hundreds of thousands of users, and you can tailor it to suit anyone's needs.

When I was with technical support, it was outstanding. Now, they are okay. They are doing their best without me. 

The CA Community: We are one big, happy family. The development team support, all the customers around the world, and myself: We are one big Endevor family. We have known each other for decades. It is an awesome environment. A really good, tight community.

I was not involved with the initial setup. It was installed when I started working for this company. 

I do not do the upgrades. Somebody else does that. The whole separation of duties thing. The system programmer has to do one thing, and I do the rest.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: From my company's point of view, cost because it is only installed on the Windows part for Sysplex, and they are too cheap to pay for the multi-LPAR license.