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Automated RunBook

The concept behind Automated RunBook is fairly simple....

"Let the code be the documentation"

....or at least most of it.

The eternal truths of application documentation:

it is never complete
it is never up to date
everyone hates doing the updates
no one trusts it unless they wrote it themselves
there are always multiple copies of the original and somehow each copy is different.

Most mainframe applications consist of the following:

Applications are usually documented by Programmers and other Support Personnel who spend many, many hours using word processors and flowcharting tools to manually produce a paper document which in many cases is just a listing of the code components along with a cursory explanation of what the code does.

It is an ineffective use of a Programmers time to have people re-list code components in a word processing document when the information is already in the computer itself. The real value of the Programmers time is spent in documenting WHAT the code components do and WHY they were written.

What Automated RunBook does is extract the code components which make up the application, process the code through the Automated RunBook system and load the results into a relational database.

All the different types of code components are brought together into a single database which can be easily searched. The different code component types can now be related to each other using standard SQL relational queries. Instead of opening up 3 or 4 different datasets to look at the code, everything is in one place and can be linked together.

Here are just a few examples of what you can query on once the data is in the database.

Which jobs execute program 'X'.
List all the jobs which access dataset 'X'.
Which jobs will create a new generation of dataset 'X' and which jobs just read dataset 'X'.
List all the Procs which use STEPLIB 'X'.
Which programs use copycode 'X'.
Which programs call sub-module 'X'.
List all the load modules compiled before/after/on date 'X'.
List all the comments from programs which are named LIKE 'X'.
List all the Jobs which are in the scheduling database for which there is no co-corresponding JCL.
List all the JCL Jobs which are not scheduled in the scheduling database.
List all the datasets which were created on 'X'day.
List all the datasets which are written to DASD and which are written to TAPE.
List all the Jobs for application 'X' but use datasets from application 'Y'.

The list of possible reports which can be run is limited only by the end users creativity

The most common reports are already pre-written and are part of the Automated RunBook product. All you have to do is run the report you need and 'fill in the blanks' requesting the Job/Proc/Copycode/etc you are interested in.