An MVS program dump only provides a call stack and does not contain statement sequencing information. However, the need of tracing back program statement sequencing is critical to the recovery process. Based on recent research, most IT shops revert to failure and defect resolution by taking the application out of production and checking code in the test environment. Seven thousand names were randomly selected from IT management databases or subscriber lists of IT publications. From these random names, the survey attracted 693 responses of which 172 qualified responses were used to draw conclusions.
Final results represent a cross-section of industries and company sizes.
In short, application failures were a common experience for respondents. This translates into some type of failure about every two weeks. Other causes of failure revealed by respondents included human error, databases, CICS and infrastructure problems. Based on these findings, the challenge for IT managers is the ongoing need to allocate approximately 10 hours each month to failure recovery when only less than half that amount of batch time is available per failure. In fact, the research revealed far less time available than needed to recover from such failures.