Most large organizations already follow a corporate backup policy. However, for individual developers, maintaining local backups before major changes can be critical in avoiding the embarrassment of calling an IT manager for help. Every developer has their own way of accomplishing this; while local backups are necessary, their actual implementation is a matter of taste. If accuracy and ease of restoration is the primary concern, full backups may be taken and stored locally. If space is a concern, differential or record-level backups may be taken.

One of the major problems in any organization is the oldest code hasn’t been tested against more newly discovered bugs. VB6, classic ASP, and even COBOL can be vulnerable to more modern flaws like SQL injection. As "Charles" writes on stack overflow,
 
“Non-parameterized dynamic statements are what you need to worry about…for example,
 
STRING "INSERT INTO TBL (a,b,c) VALUES (" X ", "Y ", "Z ")" INTO WSQLSTMT.
 
EXEC SQL PREPARE MYSTMT FROM :WSQLSTMT END-EXEC.
 
EXEC SQL EXECUTE MYSTMT END-EXEC. ”
 

Testing mainframe applications, such as CICS screens, for usability is significantly different than ...

A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.

Doug Linder

One of the companies I work for has millions of employees in...

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 bat...