BMC AMI DevX is an integrated software platform that provides mainframe development teams with modern Application Development and DevOps capabilities. The solution connects traditional mainframe environments with contemporary development practices through components for source code management, testing, debugging, and analytics.
I love these tools! However, my company has not yet transitioned from SCLM to a modern repository, and this is causing most of our developers to remain within TSO for all their development. It's been a slow adoption up to this point, but we are moving toward more modernization this year and next, so with any luck, we'll see usage pick up. Success depends on the speed at which your management is willing to move.
Gemini is well suited to help track issues and change requests, projects, bugs, time logs, etc. It is less appropriate for reporting needs or general office management needs.
The tool I use is fairly intuitive. It doesn't take long to be using it full time.
Changing the layout/view is fairly easy. This allows it to fit individual preferences.
It is helpful to be able to view specific windows in full screen. Usually, I have it set up to view multiple windows, but sometimes, I just want to view one window in full-screen mode.
the debug utility is very useful. Place stopping points is easy and one can set parameters as to when you stop at a line of code. Changing the data on the fly is easy and usefull. The interface is easy to use and make sense.
Gemini's development team continues to improve the product and provides a comprehensive roadmap of upcoming features that makes you want to upgrade as soon as a new version comes out.
Like learning to play checkers, the interface is easy, but the strategy has more of a learning curve. Figuring out the best prompts to use to get the desired outcome with less tries is taking me awhile to develop that skill. The images that I am able to generate are close to "camera-ready", but most do require some tweaking in image editing software to fix AI artifacts like distorted faces and randomly spelled words.
Support has been amazing compared to Optim. Further, new features are very regular with File-AID - I can't remember the last time Optim had a significant update. File-AID support is very receptive to feature requests and reported bugs, including sending out hotfixes quickly.
I've never had any problems with the support for the Gemini application itself, but it seems every time I re-install (on a single machine), I run into a licensing issue. As a result, I need to go to the app's website and request that my activation key gets reset or resent. In either case, it's a pain, but as I have to reinstall infrequently, it's a small price to pay for an otherwise solid application.
The installation teams for these products have never complained about any difficulties during the integration of this range of tools into our IT system.
The names may have changed over the years, but anyone who has been around for a while will recognize them. For Software Configuration Management, I have used TSO/ISPF/SCLM, Panvalet, ChangeMan, Librarian, Endevor, and now Code Pipeline. All of them met the basic requirements. All of them had their advantages and disadvantages. Code Pipeline, however, stands head and shoulders above the rest in simplicity, completeness, effectiveness, efficiency, and elegance.
In my case, it's not that Gemini won; I simply use Gemini regularly as a backup plan to compare results obtained with the leading AI in my corporate environment. I believe it's important to have this comparison of results, especially when dealing with critical issues. I think the most powerful AIs for the general public today are ChatGPT and Gemini, in that order, although CoPilot is very well positioned due to its integration with widely used Microsoft products in the corporate world.
Possitive impact. It is main product suite to enable devops in the mainframe applications team. All developers use these on day-to-day work.
Negative impact: Recent usability issues caused disappointment in the application teams. It became hard motivate the development community to increase usage.
