BMC AMI DevX

BMC AMI DevX serves as our main tool for promoting to pipelines, such as dataset moves or map programs, and other JCL moves that we previously performed using Endevor. After migrating to Topaz Workbench, we started utilizing it for these purposes.

I can provide a specific example of how I use BMC AMI DevX in my workflow. We used to have JCL move components where we create a checkout, and then the next step would be to promote it from a specific stage, such as DF or DVF level, to another stage.

For maps, we previously used Endevor, but for the past four years, we have been using the DevX app exclusively for migration. We obtain components from our managers and handle deletion of broad JCLs, which are among the beneficial uses. It is very reliable for us to perform quick deletions or movements of more than 150 JCLs, which proves to be very reliable and accurate. These represent some of the use cases where we employ it.

We have not used Java workloads for BMC AMI DevX because I am primarily a mainframe-based scheduler, and we do not work on Java-based users.

BMC AMI DevX has positively impacted our organization. Bulk updates on any possible workloads was one of the key factors that helped us save a lot of time. When it comes to small targeted end dates where we have to work extensively and process items through Endevor, which we used six years ago, the processing consumed a lot of CPU and took considerable time. However, with Workbench, we already have everything sorted out regarding when we are going to perform the implementation. Despite time constraints, we are still able to complete tasks on time with the estimated target and have yielded very good results. Our clients have greatly appreciated how we handle scheduled maintenance.

I can share some specific outcomes. Back in 2020, working with Endevor, processing JCL moves and maps in one batch used to take us around ten to fifteen minutes depending on CPU usage. During an extended quarter, when several application teams requested a migration, it became hectic for us as wait time increased. However, with the DevX app, we were able to perform bulk updates rather than one by one, eventually completing the work within thirty minutes, which typically took two to three hours. This proved very helpful and efficient. The same applies to deletion of production sources, which was very efficient rather than taking extensive time to search each component individually.

BMC AMI DevX definitely helps me develop COBOL while juggling other responsibilities.

The prior technology that we used was Broadcom's Endevor tool, which operated linearly and required us to do everything manually in the CLI. This sometimes placed a lot of strain when we submitted each migration. However, here we can perform many tasks simultaneously, saving a lot of time and troubleshooting easily by getting help from AI, which serves a bigger purpose compared to what Endevor does. I can quantify it as being ten times better than the prior tool, making this a much nicer and more polished version.

The best features that BMC AMI DevX offers are bulk updates on JCLs and bulk moves of maps to a specific dataset without any errors and without any conflicts. People who know how to use it have always been very happy about how detailed and self-explanatory it is. When it comes to other moves involving modern IDE and AI assistance, we have Workbench, VS Code, and Eclipse. We also had streamlined onboarding that was very helpful for AI code translations. Additionally, for the code pipeline, we had extended modern CI/CD orchestration to the mainframe. Since it also supports Git compatibility, we integrated it for our use cases.

The Git compatibility that we use in the mainframe helps us with distributed Git workflows such as GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps environments. Traditionally, mainframes rely on centralized Azure DevOps for source control management. This bridges that gap, allowing developers to check out COBOL and JCL codes, create isolated feature branches, and submit merge requests using standard Git commands while backend tools handle the mainframe build and deployment.

A major use case for us is that distributed teams work in their GitHub using Azure DevOps for branching and automated code reports. The mainframe team in traditional ZOS SCM uses green screen and Endevor. The most compelling part here is that this compatibility helped us integrate much more smoothly, and we had very good conversations with developers when trying to build something new and develop more use cases.

Regarding BMC AMI DevX's AI capabilities, while we have not worked extensively with them, the security concerns we have find it easier and very reliable since inactivity requires us to log in every time and other security measures are in place when uploading external vectors. That is where we excel. From whatever we have worked on, I have not experienced enough to elaborate further.

When it comes to BMC AMI DevX's AI capabilities, I feel that most of the integration process looks very convincing and smooth. From the developers' point of view, addressing skill gaps by making legacy mainframe code instantly understandable to modern developers is quite easy, and anybody can easily navigate through it. That is a big positive indicator for usage. Developers can highlight unfamiliar and undocumented COBOL or assembler code, right-click, and instantly generate a clear plain language explanation of the program's logic and behavior. This is very valuable, and the inline documentation can be copied and inserted directly into the source code as an inline comment, creating permanent documentation for future developers, which is a very important detail that we needed. These are some of the impressive aspects.

We had some hurdles with the hybrid CI/CD integration due to strict security aspects, but we managed to overcome it, and everything worked well when it comes to the integration part.

When it comes to understanding unfamiliar code, BMC AMI DevX leverages GenAI intelligent code analysis to accelerate and eliminate the friction of reading. An example is that developers can select a code sequence processing a single line of COBOL or assembler to request an immediate summary of its business logic. Instead of just explaining the syntax, the GenAI explains what the code does functionally. For instance, it calculates interest for active accounts meeting specific daily balances and writes to the daily audit file. Developers can instantly copy the AI-generated explanation and paste it back into the source program as a standard inline comment. This preserves the domain knowledge for future team members without needing manual definitions, which is very useful.

When it comes to the tool GUI for BMC AMI DevX, there are some places that I find hard to understand. For example, if you accidentally close some of the toolbars, it is difficult to track how to restore it, and that becomes a somewhat time-consuming process. This could be improved by creating a more simplified GUI so that anybody who uses it can easily learn it rather than view it as a very sophisticated system that requires more confidence to work with.

The configuration is also one of the issues that can be improved. The directories in which we store configuration sometimes exceed the space, or due to certain reboots or updates, those saves have been cleared out and it throws an error which requires us to manually create a new directory and configure everything from scratch. If it had a dedicated directory where it could, by default, run its cache or whatever configuration we keep, it would be very useful for us to act on during critical situations.

I choose eight out of ten because of two frustrating parts: one is the navigation complexity sometimes, and the other is the configuration that gets erased over reboots or cleaning of the saved directory configs. These need to be permanent and should not be stored somewhere else in the documents because VM teams often choose to clean them up over time.

I have been using BMC AMI DevX for the past four to five years.

We have not faced any major issues with the reliability of BMC AMI DevX.

BMC AMI DevX's scalability has met our needs as our organization has grown three times larger. Despite having a bunch of job scripts we had to reduce, we were still able to close that issue with BMC AMI DevX.

We had to reach out to customer support for BMC AMI DevX, and they were quite prompt and quick, which helped a lot.

I would rate the customer support a nine.

We were using Endevor, and since we had a lot of feedback and advice in completing tasks on time, we had to look for options. After checking with BMC AMI DevX providers, we found a lot of convincing features in the GUI, which felt user-friendly, so we decided to give it a try, and everybody was impressed with the output.

After moving to BMC AMI DevX, the number of associates handling the same workload for migrations got reduced from about twelve people to approximately four. We have reduced it by nearly three times, saving a lot more on budgets and creating margin for our company. However, I am not sure about the exact metrics regarding how much it was reduced.

Pricing, setup cost, and licensing were completely handled by our enterprise team, so I am not sure how it was done or arranged.

BMC AMI DevX was my first choice. We had other options, but I was not present during the decision point, so I am not certain about which other companies might have been in consideration.

BMC AMI DevX is deployed on-premises in our organization. Now that they are moving it to cloud, the migration is in progress.

We have not used the DORA metrics tracking for the decision-making process; we have not engaged with that.

I would advise others looking to use BMC AMI DevX that it is a very go-to product unless you are uncomfortable with a sophisticated GUI. It is really worth giving it a try, and there are many learning aspects in the tool which can be used for a lot of complicated migrations starting in various different fields.

I give BMC AMI DevX an overall rating of eight out of ten.

My team uses BMC AMI DevX for the development purposes of our products. BMC AMI is a BMC modern mainframe platform focused on automation, observability, DevOps, and AIOps. My team is mostly working on the development part as well as the DevOps part.

Before BMC AMI DevX, developers used to do the modification of COBOL JCL code, manual compile, and testing. Issues were found in QA. Production deployment required several manual approvals and steps. With BMC AMI DevX, developers commit the code to Git. CI/CD pipelines are automated, build the application, run code quality checks, and execute unit testing. AI-assisted tools also help explain legacy code and identify potential issues. Automated deployment pushes changes through dev, test, and prod. The benefits of using BMC AMI DevX are faster releases, fewer manual errors, and easier onboarding for developers unfamiliar with legacy mainframe code.

When implemented effectively, BMC AMI DevX delivered value beyond the DevOps team and impacted the entire organization. It provides faster issue resolution. The AI-driven anomaly detection detects the root cause and reduces the time spent investigating production issues or incidents. Operation teams can restore service faster, improving system availability and customer experience. It also improved the release velocity as an organization. As we automated the build, test, and deployment activities, it helped the team deliver enhancements more frequently. Reduced manual intervention means fewer release delays and errors. The GenAI-powered BMC AMI DevX assistant helped engineers access operational knowledge and troubleshooting guidance quickly. Overall, it increased operational resilience as well.

Regarding the metrics that improved after using BMC AMI DevX, mean time to detect was reduced from thirty minutes to five minutes, and mean time to recover and resolve as well. Previously, it was taking more than four hours, but now it has been reduced to one hour. System uptime has increased from ninety-nine point five percent to ninety-nine point nine percent of the time. These are the specific metrics that were mainly impacted by BMC AMI DevX.

For a Dev and DevOps team, the top BMC AMI DevX features are AI-powered operations and root cause analysis. Then, we have the GenAI assistance as well. DevOps enablement is already there in BMC AMI DevX and enterprise observability as well.

I have a scenario where there was a production performance issue after a release. My team deployed a new payment processing enhancement and within minutes, transaction response times increased and customers started experiencing delays. Without BMC AMI DevX, DevOps would have received alerts from multiple monitoring tools, engineering would have manually analyzed the logs, CPU usage, DB2 activity, and transactions. It would have meant several teams joining a bridge call, and root cause identification might have taken hours to resolve. With BMC AMI DevX, BMC AMI Ops automatically detects the abnormal behavior and flags it as an anomaly. AI correlates metrics across the impacted subsystems and identifies the likely source of the issue. The system provided contextual guidance and remediation recommendations directly in the operations dashboard. The DevOps team quickly discovered that a newly deployed SQL query was causing the excessive CPU consumption. The release was rolled back and then we had to do the patchwork without a major business impact. It helped reduce the mean time to detect, reduce the mean time to recover, fewer customer-facing outages, and less dependency on the senior SMEs.

Regarding AI governance and security as part of a BMC AMI DevX review, it supports enterprise authentication and role-based access controls (RBAC), helping ensure users only access systems and data relevant to their roles. It provides automated monitoring, alerting, and security management capabilities to help identify threats and maintain compliance. The BMC AMI DevX assistant is designed to use approved knowledge sources such as BMC documentation and SME-contributed knowledge, helping the organization control the information used by the AI features. An area for improvement would be a more granular AI governance dashboard showing who used the AI, what recommendations were generated, acceptance or rejection rates, model effectiveness metrics, and enhanced explainability so the team can better understand how AI recommendations were produced. Stronger governance reports for regulatory and audit reviews would also be beneficial. These capabilities would really help highly regulated industries such as banking, insurance, and healthcare.

BMC AMI DevX can be improved by simplifying the user experience. BMC AMI portfolio contains multiple products and dashboards, so new users can face a steep learning curve. A more unified and intuitive interface would improve the adoption rate. I would also recommend the enhancement of the AI. The GenAI assistant is helpful, but our organization would benefit from more proactive recommendations. AI could automatically suggest fixes, generate runbooks, and predict release risks before deployment. Cost optimization is another area for improvement because BMC AMI DevX solution can require a significant investment. More flexible licensing and modular pricing could make adoption easier for smaller teams and departments.

An improved business dashboard would also help. It would help to demonstrate the ROI.

My team and I have been using BMC AMI DevX for more than a year.

BMC AMI DevX is definitely stable and it does run reliably without frequent issues. Even if we run into some issues, the support team is really great and they help us resolve those issues as quickly as possible.

The customer support is really great and they do provide the resolutions of the issues as soon as possible. They communicate with lots of transparency and they try to do their best.

We did evaluate previous solutions, but it is confidential and I actually cannot disclose the name.

We did evaluate a few of the options, but I do not remember all the names. Finally, we chose BMC AMI DevX.

I would rate BMC AMI DevX an eight instead of a ten because it is very strong technically, but there are a few practical challenges that most enterprises experience. Real-time monitoring across the mainframe environment is excellent for observability, but the improvement areas such as steep learning curve, implementation effort, cost, and the fact that AI still supports, not replaces, need to be improved within the system. Once those things are improved, then perhaps we can rate it a ten out of ten.

Overall accuracy and output, I would say eight point five out of ten.

BMC AMI DevX is deployed on-premises in the office, not in a private cloud.

I would say go for it. It is a very helpful product for organizations that are looking to scale at an organizational level and also that are looking to automate things without doing much repetitive manual work. It will also increase the predictability of the product or the work that we are going to do. I am rating BMC AMI DevX an eight out of ten overall.

My main use case for BMC AMI DevX is mainframe application development and maintenance, especially working with COBOL and JCL applications. I use BMC AMI DevX for code development, debugging, analyzing program flow, and troubleshooting issues in both batch and online applications.

One example of how I used BMC AMI DevX in a recent project was troubleshooting a production issue in a COBOL batch job where the output was incorrect. I used BMC AMI DevX to step through the program, inspect variable values, and identify the issue in the processing logic, which made debugging much faster than manually tracing the code.

I also use BMC AMI DevX for code navigation and impact analysis when making changes to existing mainframe applications. It is especially useful for understanding dependencies between COBOL programs, copybooks, and JCL, which helps reduce the risk of introducing issues during maintenance.

BMC AMI DevX has positively impacted my organization by mainly improving developer productivity, as it makes debugging and application analysis faster. In my experience, it has reduced the time spent tracing COBOL issues and understanding existing code, which helps us resolve maintenance issues more efficiently.

I estimate that I save around 15 to 20% of my time now compared to before using BMC AMI DevX, particularly during debugging and code analysis. On a typical week, that could mean saving roughly four to six hours, depending on the complexity of the issues and application being worked on.

BMC AMI DevX definitely helps me develop COBOL while juggling other responsibilities, as it keeps me productive when I handle multiple COBOL development and maintenance tasks because debugging, code navigation, and analysis are available in one environment. It reduces the time I spend switching between tools and manually tracing issues.

Regarding how BMC AMI DevX's automated DORA metrics tracking affects my organization's decision-making processes, it had a moderate to positive impact by giving us better visibility into development and troubleshooting activity. It helps teams identify recurring issues and areas for improvement, although we still combine those metrics with developer feedback and project-level data before making decisions.

BMC AMI DevX has helped improve our deployment frequency and reduce change failure rates, but I would describe the impact as moderate rather than dramatic. Based on our experience, deployment frequency improved by roughly 10 to 15%, while change failure rates came down by around 5 to 10%, mainly through better visibility and process improvements.

BMC AMI DevX tools have affected my developers' productivity and efficiency positively compared to prior solutions, as it mainly reduces the time spent on debugging and understanding existing COBOL applications. I estimate around a 15 to 20% improvement in overall developer productivity, with debugging and code analysis seeing the biggest gains.

I evaluate BMC AMI DevX's Open Borders approach on maintaining our existing processes as having a positive impact because it allows us to maintain our existing mainframe processes without requiring major changes to our established workflows. It also makes it easier to connect mainframe development with newer tools and practices while keeping the existing applications and processes largely intact.

In my opinion, the best features BMC AMI DevX offers are the debugging capabilities, which are probably the most useful feature for me, as I can step through COBOL programs and inspect variables while troubleshooting. I also find the code navigation, program analysis, and integration with the mainframe development environment helpful for day-to-day maintenance work.

BMC AMI DevX's debugging tools make it much easier to trace the program flow and monitor variables' values without adding a lot of temporary code. For example, while troubleshooting a batch job with an unexpected calculation result, I could step through the COBOL logic and quickly identify where the value was getting changed.

BMC AMI DevX's integration with the existing mainframe development workflows is also useful, especially when working across source code, JCL, data sets, and related application components. BMC AMI DevX's analysis and navigation features help me understand dependencies faster when modifying legacy applications.

Regarding BMC AMI DevX's AI capabilities, I think the governance and security aspects are generally solid, particularly because it operates within established mainframe access controls and enterprise security practices. I would still like more visibility into AI-specific controls such as auditability, data handling, and how AI-generated recommendations are governed.

In my assessment, the accuracy and reliability of BMC AMI DevX's AI output are generally useful and reasonably accurate, especially for code analysis and assisting with understanding existing mainframe code. However, I would not rely on it blindly for production changes; I still validate the suggestions against the application logic and test results.

I have used BMC AMI DevX's GenAI-powered code understanding features for COBOL to get a quick overview of unfamiliar programs and understand the purpose of different sections. It helps reduce the initial analysis time, but I still verify the generated explanation against the actual code before making changes.

An area for improvement in BMC AMI DevX would be the user interface and overall usability, which can feel a little complex for new users coming from modern development tools. Better documentation, easier navigation, and more intuitive workflows would reduce the learning curve, especially for occasional users.

Integration with newer DevOps and CI/CD tools could be improved further in BMC AMI DevX, especially for teams working with modern development pipelines. I would also like to see more troubleshooting guidance and practical examples in the documentation, so resolving common issues requires less dependency on support teams.

I rate BMC AMI DevX an 8 because the user experience can still feel less intuitive compared to modern development tools, especially for new users. I would also like to see stronger integration with modern DevOps and CI/CD workflows and more streamlined documentation.

I have been using BMC AMI DevX for around one and a half years.

In my experience, BMC AMI DevX has been stable for day-to-day mainframe development and debugging, as we have not faced major stability issues, although like any enterprise tool, the experience can depend on the environment and configuration.

I would say BMC AMI DevX's scalability has been good for our environment, as it handles larger development teams and complex mainframe applications without major issues, and the integrated tooling becomes more valuable as the number of applications and developers grows.

BMC AMI DevX's customer support has been good overall.

Before using BMC AMI DevX, we relied more on traditional mainframe development and debugging tools, including ISPF-based tools, which is why we switched to BMC AMI DevX because it provided a more integrated development and debugging experience, making code analysis and troubleshooting faster and easier for the team.

I can confirm that we have seen a return on investment with BMC AMI DevX, mainly through the time savings rather than reduced headcount. Roughly, we have saved around four to six developer hours per week on debugging and code analysis, which I estimate translates to around a 15 to 20% productivity improvement for the developers using it regularly.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for BMC AMI DevX is that I would describe the pricing and licensing as reasonable for an enterprise mainframe tool, although the overall cost can be significant depending on the number of users and components licensed. Setup was fairly straightforward in our environment, but understanding the licensing structure and getting the right components initially took some effort.

We have looked at a few alternatives before choosing BMC AMI DevX, mainly IBM Developer for z/OS and traditional ISPF-based development and debugging tools. We compared them mainly on the debugging capabilities, code analysis, ease of use, and integration with our existing mainframe environment before choosing BMC AMI DevX.

My advice for others looking into using BMC AMI DevX is to evaluate it based on your existing mainframe environment and the specific development workflows you need to improve. I especially recommend doing a hands-on trial with the debugging and code analysis because that is where I saw the biggest productivity benefit. I rate BMC AMI DevX an 8 overall.