Gen Network Dinner
Last week, I attended the Gen Network Dinner, an evening meal sponsored by Jumar Solutions, in a plush hotel near Birmingham, UK. The dinner is an oppurtunity for Gen people in the UK to get together and discuss Gen issues over an evening meal.
There was a presentation which, ironically, didn’t contain much Gen-related content – simply because it was on the subject of replatforming Gen systems – and the Gen components are usually fairly straightforward!
The discussion over dinner was around the issues which are usually found “under the radar” and not always considered:
- differences in dumpfile formats between OS’s and versions of Gen
- the need for training in different databases and OS’s
- new infrastructure components in replatformed systems neccessitate the need for reworked support scripts etc
- support for on-call staff (since the problems they face will be different to the old ones)
- …..and more
The strand that was prevalent throughout the evening was that the non-Gen elements of a system usually provide more issues that the Gen ones!
Almost all of us that had participated in replatformings of one type or another found that this to be so.
Model Based Development, then is proven to reduce the number of problems associated with deploying to different technologies by the very fact that there is anecdotal and documentary evidence to prove this amongst the group of 15 people who were there that night!
