During a Debug tool for z/OS presentation, the IBM folks gave us a study, written by Branham Group, focused on comparing various productivity efficiencies and techniques between the IBM WebSphere Developer for z/Series (WDz) and traditional IBM mainframe development tools based on the z/OS platform.</>

The target was to build a useful working application for the mainframe in Cobol, CICS and DB2. Conclusion of the study is that IBM WDz tools are more productive for building robust mainframe and web based apps. Great!

But …hmmmm… , why I don’t feel as excited as Timothy Sipples and his “Friendly Application Development”? Perhaps is because “web based apps” was not in the title. Oh! I see, “while is possible to do this development [Web Service, Service Flow, web based interface] by hand, this is not realistic and as such was deemed as an unsupported feature of the tradicional IBM mainframe development tools”.

You can drawn your own conclusions reading this study at “WDz vs. Traditional Mainframe Development Tools Productivity Study”.

PD: But if you think you’re going to increase the productivity in terms of the number lines of code per developer per unit of time, the number of bugs per tester per unit of time, etc, you’re wrong, remember the unproductiveness factor.