Endevor Reviews

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.

With the scrum teams that Pete McCullough is working on in the Endevor community, I really can't say what we would like. We make our inputs on a weekly basis and they work on it. Previous to this solution, we would hope and hope to get something and it would take forever, if we would get it at all. Now things are coming to fruition much faster. So there's really not anything that we're yearning for. It's coming true. I don't know what else I would suggest for improvement.

We've been using it for 10 years at this company, and I used it previously for 17 years.

The tool is extremely stable. In fact, our leadership often asks what Endevor is because they have never heard it. It never breaks. It never has any issues.

Scalability in our environment is pretty robust. We're able to change it on-the-fly whenever we need to. The upgrades are fairly simple. We just went through another upgrade and it was fairly simple.

They're very attentive and they respond rapidly to us. This is a good change from how it used to be for the last 5-6 years.

We were using a different solution. When I moved to the company, I realized that it was time to get on board with cutting edge technology and get out of the arcade toy world.

I was involved in setup. It was complex from the aspect that we were going from a different, core product. It was complex converting everything over to the libraries. But CA was very, very helpful in getting that work done for us.

When selecting a vendor, check the quality of the tools, the stability, and most importantly, the customer response to issues.

Our short list was CA and IBM. IBM couldn't do what we wanted them to do, even though they told us that they could. So CA won hands down.

I've been in this world for quite a few years and I haven't seen anything that's even close to doing what Endevor does. Give me a call. I seriously recommend that you consider this solution. Talk to the techs at CA. Ask the CA reps to contact you. They can really give you solid advice.

It is easy to use, easy to learn, and easy to maintain; also the automation.

We primarily benefit in terms of the availability and reliability of our software during the development lifecycle.

There are a lot of areas: using it cross-platform; across a diverse set of application portfolios, including legacy systems, as well as open systems; both waterfall and Agile development. I'm not sure I can say there's one particular focus. We can have more features.

We find the solution to be very stable. There are no major issues or problems that I'm aware of.

We run a very large enterprise, so it scales very well for us.

We get very good and timely responses from support. It is very good.

This solution has been in place for a long time, longer than I've been around.

I'm not sure I can say which vendors were on the short list, but I can tell you that decisions are made primarily from the standpoint of cost effectiveness for the business, as well as the product features and functions. It must be able to meet the minimum requirements as well as be cost effective. The overall efficiency and effectiveness is there; and the responsiveness is there.

When I choose a vendor, I look at stability, reliability, responsiveness, and efficiency.

Do your homework. Talk to customers. Don't just rely on market research. Find what other people's experiences have been. It's very valuable.

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 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.

Valuable features of Endevor include the ability to see all code modifications and a smooth transition into production.

Our organization now has standardized change management processes for implementation into production. With our old process, any number of people could have put code into production, but now Endevor is the only user who can touch production.

The parts of Endevor which we use do not need improving as they work very well.

Endevor offers many flexible processing options, but our organization does not use the product’s capabilities to their fullest potential. The processing options in our shop work quite well and are easy to understand.

Conversion to Endevor began about nine years ago.

I have not encountered any stability issues. Each version upgrade of Endevor has been stable.

As Endevor moves through the stages toward production, disk space can become an issue. PDSE structures resolve space issues.

Endevor technical support is definitely a 10/10. I have few issues with Endevor which require technical support. However, when I do submit an issue or question, response is immediate.

Our previous solution was an in-house developed system. The switch to Endevor was made because the in-house developed system was cumbersome to use and was lacking accountability.

The initial Endevor setup was very straightforward. After setting up the system and subsystem information within Endevor, source code is ported into Endevor through a batch process. Endevor keeps track of components for each element, so one part does not move into production without the other parts.

I’m not sure if other options were evaluated. Endevor had already been selected by the time I joined the team.

Do not bring the current process into Endevor. Consider moving forward using standard methodology, and make the move to Endevor a priority project.

It’s a very nice product and runs without errors.

I thought the most valuable feature of the product was maturity in the process, in the tool itself. In other words, while there were many things we would have liked it to have done, what it did, it did very well.

Over the course of many years of usage, one of the things that we found that some customers wanted to have was point-in-time recovery, which was one thing that I worked on. I remember I was on a project that was called Space Station Freedom at the time, with NASA. They felt like they needed to have a point-in-time recover process. They built that into the tool. They got it done, so there was a way to do it.

Quick Edit was a big add-on. Initially, when I started working with the tool, there was pretty much, "Use your own text editor." ISPF, because everything was ISPF based. You would add it into the tool through the normal script language or core ground processing. Well, they came up with something called Quick Edit, which was an add-on to the tool, but it was seamless. It just gave you an editor where you could go in and change a single object and save it and have it kick off the build in a development stage. It was that automation that really, I think, helped catapult Endevor because before, it was little bit more restrictive. It was more cumbersome to work with.

Since then, I haven't done a whole lot with it.

I'd say, overall, as a development tool, it helped us to automate processes that otherwise were very manually intensive. As a release tool, there probably could have been some additional enhancements, but it was effective. I could easily go from one LPAR to the next LPAR at the push of a button.

The funny thing is that I've learned that most organizations didn't know how much they appreciated it until they didn't have it.

There were a lot of developers who naturally oppose any process that they would deem to be making their jobs more cumbersome. In other words, more overhead on the task that they had to complete. The automation that we were able to build in; we were doing essentially some aspects of agile development before it was even a concept, because we were doing integrated builds every hour, on the hour, with no problems. It was virtually automated, totally automated. All the program had to do was finish your code, let us know, approve a package, and then it would go.

It was just a very nice process. When it was running properly, it was very transparent relative to the whole application development lifecycle.

I have used it off and on for about 26 years.

It was very consistent. When implemented appropriately, it was very solid. It was very stable; it was dependable. I never failed an audit with Endevor.

The only time that we really had down time is when we abuse it or we didn't follow our regular maintenance process. I can think of maybe once or twice in all the years that I've had it where the MCF was corrupted, or the package data set was corrupt, because either one of them could be catastrophic.

They were built on a solid VSAM validation, so it really never caused a lot of issues in that way, although from time to time, some of the share options were not allocated appropriately. Therefore, we might have run into issues of performance degradation, normally, when the share options weren't set right.

There was something called L-serve, which was a separate component that ran as an instance to start a task. That helped improve performance. I remember at one point it did, but in my last installation, we didn't even use it. I was able to use PDSEs and everything was fine, along with the V-samp files which were for the MCF.

I think the scalability did improve over the years, because if there were was issues with performance degradation, it would have been due to not configured properly. For example, too many environments that were nested or linked to each other, which caused a problem because the search routines would have to go through multiple sets of data sets in order to resolve what it is that you were querying. It really depends on how you set that up. Numbers or integers can cause performance degradation, but with that said, there are companies out here that have hundreds, if not thousands, of people connected to Endevor. They do not have these problems, so I know there are probably testimonies much better than mine that could prove that. I've known of many companies that they were using it on a very large operation. Mine might have had, over the last 10 years, maybe 100 or 150 programmers, but I know of others that have 600, 700, 800 or more.

Support has always been excellent. I know Paul Lewis is still there. I remember he was one of the first people I talked to. He would give you that tough love. He says, "Well, when in doubt, try it out." That was always the same. I would say something like, "Paul, do you think I could do this? Do you think I could do that?" His response: "Oh, well, Mark, when in doubt, try it out." I said, "Okay."

I'd go try it and maybe it would work. If it was something that he knew for sure that I was the one exploring it and we were at second- or third-level support, he would say something like, "Okay, well, we have a problem," or right away he would tell me if it was a known issue. There's no way that any company's supporting a product like that, or for any product, knows of all of the variants or considerations - just by searching a data base repository.

Work with CA, a third party or CA consultancy to do a proof-of-concept; not just the demo out of the can, but actually take an application or some part of an application, do a POC, and then get it on your machine. Even if you have to pay for it, it would be worth it, because that's going to set a foundation for you to be successful with the initial implementation. One thing, when working with the consulting company, they're going to have a better view of your configurations, your systems, and your environment. Work with them, and that will make you successful in the long run.

I have not given a perfect rating because I would want that one extra point to be for some subjective criteria that I haven't even thought of.

As an administrator, the csv utility and reporting are vital in obtaining information for leadership.

The introduction of promotion packages was awesome. In the past, we would have to create multiple (up to five) packages to move coded changes into production. We had to have a naming standard in place in order to be able to pull the information for audit. Now, our processes are streamlined in that we only have to create a single package and all of the information is there for audit.

The Eclipse based UI still needs improvement and CA is working on that in v18.

I have been using Endevor for 16 years at three different companies.

I have not seen any stability issues.

I have not seen any scalability issues.

I would rate technical support as very good.

Endevor has been in place as long as I have worked in my current role.

I did not perform the installation.

I did not choose this product.

• Resilience capacity for mainframe applications
• Self-installation z/OS workflow
• Informative content to save a rich source of events, such as a movie of the real evolution of our IS

For any organization to succeed in implementing this software is dependent upon the resilience of staff in the face of frequent organizational changes of the information system and in their work. It can manage the continuous-flow deliveries or cascade deliveries.

Globally this product manages back end process powered by z/OS. The interface could be improved in terms of the MMI/HMI. For example, with monitoring, the graphic view of the evolution of the IS.

Conceptually this system is based on a centralized vision. An improvement axis should exist to help you open your system and to decentralizing it. Converge a unified HMI for, and propose, more analyses and opportunities for the graphical analysis of the content of data included in repositories.

We've had issues with the stability of the genotype, the repository integrity.

It's OK, but it could be better with an incremental approach.

They are serious and display empathy.

It's complex because it depends upon your development architecture. Also, it's reached the limits of automation and freedom given to end users.

You need to think why you want to use an application configuration management system and if it matches with your development objectives.