10 Tips & Tricks to Master ILEditor 2 Faster

Migrating to ILEditor 2: Best Practices and Pitfalls to Avoid

Migrating to ILEditor 2 can improve productivity, modernize your RPG/ILE development workflow, and unlock new tooling integrations—but only if planned and executed carefully. This guide gives a concise, prescriptive migration path, practical best practices, and common pitfalls with mitigation steps so your switch is smooth and low-risk.

1. Plan migration scope and goals

• Define objectives: Performance, team consistency, plugin integrations, or modernization.
• Scope: Full workspace migration, selected projects, or parallel adoption.
• Timeline: Short pilot (2–4 weeks) → staged rollout → full adoption.
• Stakeholders: Developers, build/release engineers, QA, and ops.

2. Inventory current environment

• List projects (name, repo path, language/features used).
• Record extensions/plugins in use and their versions.
• Capture build/test pipelines and any custom scripts.
• Identify platform-specific dependencies (compilers, compilers flags, IBM i items).

3. Create a pilot project

• Pick a representative project (medium complexity, uses common features).
• Migrate only necessary artifacts (source, build scripts, database links).
• Run baseline metrics (build time, test coverage, linter warnings) for comparison.

4. Prepare environment and tooling

• Install ILEditor 2 on pilot machines, matching team OS versions.
• Verify required plugins are available or find alternatives; if missing, plan custom extension development or retained legacy editor use for those tasks.
• Align linters and formatters: ensure settings mirror previous rules or intentionally update them in a controlled way.
• Version control integration: confirm Git/SVN settings, commit hooks, and CI tokens work with ILEditor 2.

5. Migrate code and configuration

• Move project files into new workspace structure if ILEditor 2 requires different layout.
• Update build scripts where option names or tool paths changed.
• Migrate editor settings (tabs, indentation, encoding) to avoid diffs from whitespace changes.
• Document environment variables and local overrides so developers can reproduce builds locally.

6. Validate functionality and quality

• Run full builds and unit tests. Compare results to baseline metrics.
• Perform static analysis and fix newly surfaced issues in a triaged backlog.
• Manual QA pass for critical features—particularly anything interacting with system APIs, DBs, or platform-specific behavior.
• Performance checks: measure compile times and runtime behavior if applicable.

7. Roll out progressively

• Staged adoption: team subset → additional teams → organization-wide.
• Dual-editor period: allow teams to revert to previous editor for quick fixes while migrating.
• Provide migration checklist for developers: install, workspace import, run tests, push to CI.

8. Training and documentation

• Host short workshops (30–60 minutes) demonstrating differences, shortcuts, and new workflows.
• Create cheatsheets for common tasks and troubleshooting.
• Update onboarding docs and CI/deployment runbooks with new steps.

9. Monitor and iterate

• Collect feedback via short surveys or a migration channel.
• Track KPIs: build failures, mean time to resolve environment issues, developer satisfaction.
• Patch workflows based on recurring issues or pain points.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

• Pitfall: Skipping a pilot project.
  Avoid by starting small to uncover integration and build issues early.

• Pitfall: Assuming feature parity with old editor.
  Avoid by inventorying plugins and verifying equivalents; implement fallbacks for missing functionality.

• Pitfall: Not preserving editor settings (encoding, tabs).
  Avoid by exporting/importing settings or including recommended settings in repo.

• Pitfall: Breaking CI/CD unexpectedly.
  Avoid by testing CI with migrated projects in a feature branch before merging.

• Pitfall: Insufficient developer training.
  Avoid by scheduling brief hands-on sessions and distributing clear reference material.

• Pitfall: Large one-time migration.
  Avoid by staging rollout and allowing a rollback path.

Quick Migration Checklist

1. Define goals & timeline.
2. Inventory projects, plugins, and pipelines.
3. Choose pilot project and baseline metrics.
4. Install ILEditor 2 and required extensions.
5. Migrate workspace, build scripts, and settings.
6. Run builds, tests, and static analysis.
7. Roll out in stages with training.
8. Collect feedback and iterate.

Final recommendations

• Prefer a staged migration with a clear pilot to reduce risk.
• Preserve reproducibility: commit editor settings and CI changes in separate, reviewable commits.
• Treat migration as a short project: assign an owner, track progress, and close out with a retrospective.

If you want, I can produce a customizable migration checklist tailored to your repository structure and CI system—tell me your CI (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions) and typical repo layout.