My name is Keegan Miller and this was my first time being a next-gen mainframe at
Broadcom and I enjoyed every second of it. The environment here at Broadcom allowed
me to challenge myself and grow as a developer.
I was fortunate enough to work with the 1.21 Jiggawatts scrum team where I was tasked
with two important projects. The first project was discovering discrepancies between the
DDL generation between two company maintained products. This project was important
because it allowed the team to preemptively discover issues before they were brought
up by customers. In the second project, the team had me working on updating the
automation framework we use in order to run test cases. My updates enabled parallel
features to be worked on simultaneously.
Learning the mainframe starting off was a real challenge for me. To start off, I have
never worked with a mainframe, DB2/zOS, nor JCL. I barely even knew what a
mainframe was besides a computer somewhere storing near endless amounts of data.
The closest I came to working with any of these was a semester where I learned
assembler. I think what really helped me was the documentation already provided by
Broadcom online and also peers who were willing to take the time out of their busy
schedules to walk me through what everything meant. For the first 2 weeks I had
numerous meetings with my mentor and other members of the team who taught me
more about the products I would be using.
The first project really forced me to become familiar with a lot of the database
administrator products Broadcom supports. While running test cases to generate the
sets of DDL, a lot of the time the framework would crash due to an error. I had to go into
the mainframe and walk through each step of the test case in order to figure out where
the issue occurs.
It was through this constant exposure that eventually I was even tasked with running QA
testing on an actual internal defect plaquing one of Broadcom’s DB admin products. I
was comfortable enough with the product that I was able to successfully generate
thorough tests that the team used in addressing the problem.
In my second project I was able to add functionality to an already existing production
framework. This framework would connect to the mainframe and automate test cases
created by the team. The skills this project brought me were a better understanding of
python, API’s, and object oriented programming
As my time here begins to wind down, I can say that I have learned a lot. This
experience was so beneficial to me because it gave me exposure to mainframes, Agile
development, and it even gave me a better understanding of Python. Broadcom
presented itself as a place I would be more than happy to work at.