Knowledge that Transforms

With the widespread popularity and reliability of microcomputers and the availability of easy-to-use application generators and application packages, it has become possible to introduce computer systems into environments where this was not practical either from a technical or an economic standpoint. This paper will describe how an integrated, multi-application system was developed and successfully implemented two years ago for a forest products company. Emphasis will be placed on: ▪ How the application generator aided or constrained development.▪ How the development process and system design differed from the traditional approach, in view of the requirement that the system should operate entirely without trained technical support.

The most common way to identify success or failure of a job running in a batch-processing mode is by examining a completion code sent by the job to the host operating system. Yet, for a variety of reasons the completion code may inaccurately indicate a successful termination of the job. This article describes a different approach to monitoring the quality of batch processing jobs while in operation. A pattern of behavior is suggested for a program. The pattern reflects ratios of consumption of various hardware resources. The ratios are determined by collecting historical performance variables of the job and analyzing the data by means of statistical methods. Once a pattern is set, the performance variables of every individual run of the program are compared with the precalculated pattern of behavior and if the deviation is beyond certain limits an alarm is triggered. The proposed quality control technique has been tested on real applications, as well as on some artificial programs. The findings suggest that the technique is reliable in that it successfully distinguishes between proper and malfunctioning runs of a program.