Wednesday, November 05, 2008

playing archeologist @ the job

My job at the bank involves software testing. As a tester. It can be boring at time. And trying to find defect on a huge system can be crazy. And my team testing a software that is huge......real huge and messy.

It just happens I am free(and bored), at the company. So I dig around with the codes. Looking at codes and copybooks(cobol equivalent of a header). Seeing what it does etc. It is like looking at a old writings, writen in a style few would understand. And like digging at the sites.

The hard part is, the system contains hundreds of copybook, and hundreds of working codes, not to mentions JCL script. Some is commented, often not all contain the enough information. And I still try to find the documentations. The full documentations I mean. Piece together a few at a time.

The prelimentary result is, a few of the copybook is found, and it is not documented(not sure how it would help in the work). And still a lot more to dig.

Lesson learnt, file-aid is a useful tools on the mainframe. And cobol is verbose, but readable. And lastly, looking at how different mainframe and other platform software look is interesting.

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