One of the companies I work for has millions of employees in total, and keeps records on them in several databases that exchange data through flat files. While this system seems to violate the principle of a single source of data, it’s been in place for years and works well. There must be a reason for this replication of data, and for allowing some inconsistency.
 
People almost always expect their cases to be unique and different. A person may fall behind on their insurance or their 401k contributions for reasons beyond their control, and they don’t expect to lose their be

Batch automation is frequently included by both database and operating system vendors; and typically, these two software categories approach the problem differently. Databases on the windows platform, for example, typically offer much greater scripting and control flow than the native Windows task scheduler. Similarly, Unix-based database vendors offer batch automation and job scheduling beyond the simple utilities, like cron, that are bundled with the OS.

One of the major problems in any organization is the oldest code hasn’t been tested against more new...

With good program architecture debugging is a breeze, because bugs will be where they should be.

David May

Most large organizations already follow a corporate backup p...

Testing mainframe applications, such as CICS screens, for usability is significantly different than testing a web or windows application. CICS applications excel in data entry environments in which a mouse is seldom used, such as use within a call center, and testing should keep this benefit and intended application in mind.
 
One list of tes...