Programming Introduction
This introduction comes directly from our own portal, where we help employees understand each department's role at CU*Answers. Here, we share the same information with you that we share with our employees.
Jack Carpenter
Vice President of Programming
Welcome to the to the Programming team's page. Our motto is "Service/Teamwork". Although the programming team is divided into several individual teams we definitely get through the day as one big team. You will often see members of one team helping someone else from another team. As you will see from the daily on-call schedule, a different programming team member takes a specific day of the week in helping with daily support. We share this responsibility so that no one programmer takes all the support calls in any one given week. By working as part of the support team this also gives a person more exposure to the CU*BASE software.
Almost all of our coding is done using the RPG (Report Program Generator) language on an iSeries 400. We do all of our coding on a iSeries 400 called the DEV (Development) 400. We also have an iSeries 400 called the QC (Quality Control) 400, which is used for testing. We are able to change the date on this box for testing purposes. You may have a backup tape from a week ago and may want to simulate what happened at EOD (End of Day) on that day, with the QC box you can. Once we are done with our testing we then turn the project over to the QC department which does further testing. Once they are done the project is then moved to production, which means we move the programs to our production library CUBASEPTF on the Development 400 and then the object is move to the PROD (Production) 400. We only move programs to production once a month, usually the second weekend in the month. We do not keep any source for programs on our PROD 400. We also have three major releases a year, a Spring, Fall and Year End.
While our primary goal is to create software, we think of ourselves as the service department of CU*Answers. While other departments do service others within the CU*Answers team they primarily service our clients while we primarily service the different departments within CU*Answers. During a typical day in the programming department a member of the team may take several calls from the CSR department, a couple of calls from Operations and possibly answer a question about the software from someone else in another department. We may have to determine how to recover from someone receiving an file in twice and then posting it or we may have to answer a simple question of how a CU*BASE menu option works. We have two support teams, one that performs daily support and one that performs nightly support. Up until this year there as been three members of the programming team that have provided nightly support, Lora Goodin, Lorie Ransom and Jack Carpenter. We now welcome Darrell Stickler to the nightly support team. Jody Karnes, our CIO, continues help out with nightly and daily support by filling in when needed and also helping when a support person needs some of her experience to solve a problem. The four members of the nightly support team rotate weeks on support, a week starts on Monday and ends on Sunday. The on call schedule is posted on our teams Intranet page.
When not keeping the data processing world safe from software bugs, Jack dreams of being a NASCAR driver, following the path of his driving hero, Johnny Benson. He's also looking to start a club for all interested in the social behavior of earthworms.
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