Planning and Designing Your Program

This chapter identifies and describes the objectives and the z/VM® facilities you need to consider during the planning phase of z/VM application development.

You develop and use applications to solve problems and make certain tasks easier and faster to do—applications automate a process. Planning is the first phase in the application development process. You, as an application programmer, planner, or both, decide how to build an application package to execute successfully and efficiently. Once you determine the application's requirements, you plan an application package that satisfies these requirements. An application package can be a single application within one virtual machine or a group of applications located in many different virtual machines communicating with each other.

Note: Throughout this book, the terms application, application package, application system, and program are used interchangeably.
Before planning your application, you must:
  • Understand the function of the application (what problem you must solve).
  • Understand the environment the application will run in (z/VM CMS programming environment). See Introduction to the CMS Programming Environment for information on the CMS programming environment.
After you are through planning your application, you begin designing your application by expanding the objectives set by your plan.