We say that Access Gen is non-prescriptive but what do we mean by this? Access Gen does not force you to follow new processes to do your work, because you already have years of experience in your own environment. What it does provide is a wide range of features that streamline those processes. Its reports and features have been specifically developed to support all CA Gen projects regardless of development methodology or application type. From the moment it’s installed, it can start saving your developers and administrators time by giving them direct access to the information they need and targeted support for their everyday tasks.

Customers both large and small report similar findings using Access Gen. A large (250 licensed workstation) customer evaluated the software on six out of their twelve major projects. Projects using Access Gen reported savings of between two and four hours per developer, per week. Similarly, smaller ten person development teams summarised their use of Access Gen with the same developer savings. Both customer teams also noted greatly improved response times and a reduction in frustration with the encyclopedia across the board. With these kinds of productivity improvements, costs and/or delivery times are significantly reduced. The return on investment for a base license is just 20 weeks. With the inbuilt discounts in the seat based licensing, the larger the license, the better the ROI and the bigger the savings.

Most Gen applications are large, and for new teams wanting to quickly understand their new responsibilities, Access Gen can provide insight and visibility to help. The ability to drill down inside the application to see application structures, and cross-module usage, is invaluable helping development teams understand both how the application works, and how it is structured. Access Gen’s direct access into the encyclopedia ensures that responses are always quick so that your developers are productive quickly, and not waiting on critical but constrained infrastructure.

For development teams making ongoing sets of small changes to existing large applications, the importance of complete and accurate impact analysis is crucial. Access Gen’s huge strength is in allowing developers to very quickly assess the potentially wide-ranging impacts of their proposed changes, before they make them. This ensures developers understand precisely what they need to modify within the application, how the change needs to be tested, and what areas of the application require regression testing, even though they may not have been directly altered.

Since Access Gen supports the full Software Development Lifecycle, it naturally includes the capability for developers to subset, check-in, check-out and migrate changes. For developers this makes management of their changes straightforward, and for administrators, provides a simple method of managing change across development teams.

The installation process for Access Gen is straightforward and once up and running, there are no changes required to the way you work to use Access Gen. Either a web based training session or a visit is recommended so your team knows what the software can do, and the simple, intuitive browser interface makes adoption easy.