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Symbolic Files

Before configuring your CA Technologies testing tool product, carefully consider how to best organize your symbolic information that is stored in your PROTSYM files. Well organized symbolic information allows the most effective and efficient access to your symbolics during testing.

There is no one correct way to organize symbolic information that works best for everyone. How you organize your symbolic information will always depend on your environments, your application systems, and the number of programs and programmers involved in your testing. Although there is no best organization that works for everyone, you should consider the following guidelines when planning for symbolic support:

• In a production environment, consider maintaining a separate PROTSYM file for each application system that can be shared by all of your programmers. Because only one copy of each program is typical in a production environment, the same symbolic information could be shared by any programmer debugging in that environment.

  In production environments, symbolic information is often limited to a single version of each program, and testing or debugging is typically less frequent and often limited to critical, real-time failures. Separate, shared PROTSYM files allow you to maintain a single set of symbolic information for each production application system that would be ready and available for access in the event of a failure.

• In a test environment, multiple versions of the same program are more likely to exist, and shared executable libraries are complimented by sandbox libraries that house test fixes or various works in progress. For this environment, a single shared symbolic repository is adequate for the shared executables, but additional symbolic repositories would be required for each individual programmer to use with their own testing environment. Allowing each programmer to own their own PROTSYM file provides them with the freedom to test using the correct symbolic information without impacting other members of the team.

Business Value:

Well organized symbolic information lets your application programmers easily locate, access, and share symbolic information for their programs. As a result, you could see better performance for your CA Technologies testing tools, optimal use of your DASD space, and the best possible productivity for your application programmers.

Additional Considerations:

As a general rule, think of your PROTSYM files as nothing more than a match for your load libraries, remembering that for each unique version of a load module you may require symbolic information for testing or debugging. Like the load libraries that exist at each level or stage of your development environment, the corresponding symbolic files should vary in size depending on the maximum number of programs expected at each level, with the individual PROTSYM files being the smallest by far.

If you are also licensed for CA Endevor Software Change Manager (CA Endevor SCM), CA testing tools provide an additional level of automation through dynamic symbolic support. This feature lets you populate your PROTSYM file dynamically on demand with symbolic information for programs built using CA Endevor SCM.

More Information:

For more information about creating, populating, maintaining, and using your PROTSYM symbolic repositories to enhance your testing, see the CA Application Quality and Testing Tools Symbolic Guide, which is provided with each CA Technologies testing tool product.

For more information about dynamic symbolic support, see the CA Mainframe Application Tuner Installation Guide.