Okay, I'll give it a shot:
1) You have a critical APAR installation which requires
management approval to apply it on production. The
Ops Manager is in Aruba, the CIO is in a coma, and
your other tech support staff are at a beer bust.
What do you do?
A) Ensure you've got full backups on Prod, then apply
the APAR on your own authority.
B) Test it on Dev first - your code monkeys aren't as
important as keeping Production up and running.
C) Test it on a Sandbox LPAR first - that's what it's
there for.
D) Sneak it into the Operator's night cycle, then go
to the beer bust - let the tape apes take the
blame!
2) The CIO, a big-iron neophyte, wants an explanation why
you need an upgrade from a z890 to a z900, with an
addition of 6 new CPUs and 256GB of main memory, as
well as an appropriate number of shark spindles. What
do you do?
A) Explain the business need as outlined by overall
production growth over the past four years.
B) Provide RMF charts to show the past 2 years of
increased use and the next two years of upgrade
capacity.
C) Go into a deep technical explanation of hardware
and software requirements, explaining in hex
wherever possible.
D) Bore the CIO into the coma mentioned in Question 1,
so that you won't catch seven kinds of hell when you
apply that APAR on production until s/he regains
consciousness.
3) The local bakery is having a special on donuts - 12
assorted for $6.95. You have four Tech Support staff
as direct reports, but you also have 5 operators across
two shifts who will require bribing, as well as the
Ops Manager and the shift managers. You also have two
external auditors doing a SOX review of the system. Two
of the people are diabetic, one is lactose intolerant,
and one is on Atkins. How many donuts do you order from
the local bakery?
A) 30 - Allows two per person, plus an extra two for you.
B) 24 - Auditors (especially externals) don't get donuts,
and YOU'RE the one on Atkins.
C) 18 - And you keep them out of the site of the folks
with the medical issues.
D) None - The local bakery ain't Krispy Kreme!
Answers on a 80-column card, please!
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of Eric Sun
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2007 04:30
To: [email protected]
Subject: Testing System Programmer Capabilities
HI, all
Our company recently had been given a task by our client to test the
responsiveness and capabilities of their systems programmer in their test
environment. Our tasks assigned include to hack their system to
cause/simulate system and application outage, of course not to the extent of
hanging/re-IPLing the whole system.
Just want to know whether anyone out there have done any similar test before
and willing to share what they have tested. Btw, we will be provided with
powerful TSO user IDs but won't be allowed to touch any system module and
probably just to change some control blocks in memory. Somehow, it seems
easy to think what you can do in CICS and DB/2 but it's easier said than
done in MVS.
The systems programmers will be given at least 1-1/2 hour limit to resolve
the problem.
Thanks and regards
Eric Sun
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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