Thursday, June 21, 2007

How to categorize a mainframe application

Most of the times we need to analyze and categorize the Mainframe application into simple medium and complex. What do we do?
Here are snapshot questions we can rely on:

Key questions :
a) What the Business Functionality.
b) What are the key interfaces are there.
c) How many key interfaces are there for the application.
d) What is the data and information flow,
e) What are the data attributes for all system interactions.
f) What is the cycle time for complete accessing of the applications.
g) What are the backend data verification [DB2 tables] through Spufi (SQL Processing Using File Input), QMF (Query Mgmt Facility) or any such means and even through Batch runs.
h) Does the application involve CICS or any other information control system from testing per se.
i) How many batch jobs are required to run the application successfully.
j) What is the order of batch runs and the order of their execution
k) Does the application involve any kind of Data collection system. Also are there, if yes, how many batch runs for activities such as – Audit, Resync and Data Archival, Data Retrieval, DB2 load and Unload operations etc.
l) Are any Test Data management systems being used in the application(s) e.g utilities like FileAid (from Compuware) etc.
m) What is the mode in which the tables are available (RW,W,R etc)
n) How many tabels does the application support
o) How is the DB schema designed
p) Which forms (from RDBMS per se) it support. E.g Form -1,2,3 etc.
q) What is the archiving and purge cycle
r) How long is the archiving and purging cycle.
s) What is the support system that the application uses
- hardware platform
- O/S
- Language support
- Database / File System
- Messaging/Middleware/Online Environments
- Tools/Development Environments

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good words.