Synon/CM

Delivering Model Level Change Management

For more infomation please contact our Business Partner Silvon.

• Problems Synon/CM Was Designed To Solve
• Product Description
  Model Level Change Management
  Synon/2E Rel. 5.0 Enhancements
  Synon/CM Enhancements

• Benefits of Product Use
• Technical Specifications

Delivering a full application software engineering solution requires more than just the appropriate development tools. A key component to the success organizations can achieve with sophisticated development software is the management and control of change.

Change is now a constant factor in IS organizations: changes in business practices, changes due to government legislation, changes due to competitive pressures. Synon/2E is a tool to rapidly develop solutions to address these changes. Synon/CM provides the ability to bring the changed applications through test to production in a smooth, well managed and audited process.

Synon/CM represents a breakthrough in the area of change management for model based application development and generation.

Note: Synon/CM Release 4.0 replaces Synon/IM Release 3.3. The name change reflects the new high level of integration of this product with Synon/2E.

Product Description

A significant amount of the effort that has been put into Synon/2E Release 5.0 has been to enable integrated change management in conjunction with Synon/CM. Synon/2E R5.0 provides the infrastructure that is necessary for change management. This includes impact analysis, function check-in and check-out and versioning. The customer who licenses Synon/CM will be able to take full advantage of these change control facilities.

To manage and orchestrate the promotion and rollback of applications in an automated fashion, you will need Synon/CM. To use an analogy, the OS/400 commands such as MOVOBJ, CRTDUPOBJ and CPYF are part of the infrastructure that is used by AS/400 change management tools to promote applications into test and production. However, one would not say that the existence of these commands meant that OS/400 was a change management tool!

Model Level Change Management

To provide this sophisticated new change management capability at the Synon design model level, a series of additional enhancements to both Synon/2E and Synon/CM have been carried out.

Synon/2E Rel. 5.0 Enhancements

The enhancements to Synon/2E made with Release 5.0 represent a range of technology, usability and performance improvements. In response to requests from our customer base, a major portion of the enhancements are related to change management. These change control facilities include the following:

• Audit Stamp on Model Objects
• Multi-level impact analysis
• Model object lists
• Re-design of model copying facilities
• Model object change tracking• Revert-to-prior capability on functions
• Synon/2E interface(s) to enable Synon/CM change and promotion activities

The concept of the model object list is pivotal to Synon's change management approach. This concept, introduced with Release 5.0, provides a means to group together Synon/2E objects such as fields, files, access paths and functions. By grouping the objects together into model object lists, the Synon/2E user can manipulate the list for actions related to change.

For example, you may need to change the length of an important field such as Customer Number. Using impact analysis, the developer can automatically build a list of all objects affected by that change. The programming team can then work through the list of objects to carry out any necessary amendments to the affected objects.

Once this has been done, the list can be submitted for generation and compile. The same list can then be used as a release or PTF and promoted through test and QA to the end-user sites. With Synon/CM, this promotion can occur automatically to a number of remote locations.

Synon/CM Enhancements

The new link to the model level change control facilities, together with a number of related extensions to Synon/CM, provides support for:

• Check-out for model objects, including conflict detection and resolution
• Check-out and promotion of impacted objects
• Performance improvements on Create Requests step
• Archive and rollback of function versions
• Promotion options to control generate and process
• User authorities and restrictions to control Synon/2E model access
• Enablement for Synon/CSG objects
• Many Synon/2E panels now directly access Synon/CM panels
• More Synon/CM panel now directly access Synon/2E panels

Benefits of Product Use

Synon/CM, together with Synon/2E Release 5.0, sets another industry benchmark by which all AS/400 midrange application development tools will be judged. Using the two products in unison will bring you the ability to manage and distribute changes to an application at the level of the design model, and maintain integrity with the generated source and object code.

Synon/CM also provides a highly automated approach to the distribution of software changes. This saves a considerable amount of time and effort when delivering changes to applications at multiple remote sites.

These enhancements, together with an ever growing list of implementation independent generators, continue to reinforce Synon/2E's position as the leader in its marketplace.

Technical Specifications