IBM's Interactive System Productivity Facility (ISPF) is a software library management tool for editing, versioning, auditing, and promoting source code. ISPF is used by Mainframe programmers at any serious Mainframe shop. Whether programmers are developing, testing, and writing complex programs or creating reports and auditing operations, ISPF is the only game in town in the world of Mainframes. Yet for all the widespread use of ISPF, there is no widespread consensus about ISPF's ease of use. Indeed, ISPF is widely regarded as cumbersome to use, especially if programmers are switching tasks throughout the day, trying to call up lines of commonly-used code in Edit or Browse modes, or to automatically invoke built-in, third-party, or installation-written functions and facilities, like sequential data sets, and PDS/PDSE, SEQ and VSAM files. In those cases, ISPF programmer productivity can drop off because ISPF demands a great deal of manual work to retrieve, re- write, or call-up the wide variety of code sequences used when programming.
