When you have to figure out a big, complicated program you’re not familiar with, what do you do? Can you explain the process you go through? If you’re a manager of people who maintain programs, what do you know about how they figure out programs? How are they doing it? Are they doing it efficiently? Correctly?

Research studies have shown that maintenance programmers spend about half their time trying to figure out the programs they are tasked with modifying. That’s half the maintenance budget. What can be done to improve this process, to increase quality, value delivered, and speed to

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

Part 1 and Part 2 of this little series on generating an Excel spreadsheet demonstrated how to use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code to retrieve data from DB2 on an AS/400 and place it in a spreadsheet. Additional refinements were offered on doing some fancier things to the spreadsheet, such as auto-sizing all the columns based on the loaded data, formatting date columns properly, etc. All of this was done in the name of programmatically creating a nice spreadsheet with current “DB2 for i” data. This tip

As I reported a few weeks ago, i5/OS V5R3 loses IBM support as of April 30th, which may cause many iSeries and System i shops to upgrade their operating systems in the next few months. If you’re currently working on a V5R3 upgrade, here are four things that you should watch out for as you plan your upgrade.

Be Aware of the Difference Between Compatible and Supported Software

For third-party software, it’s important to understand the difference between a compatible and a supported piece of software. I recently ran into this issue on an i5/OS V5R4 upgrade where the vendor