Improved Automated Testing for z/OS

Automated testing is foundational to gaining the speed required in today’s dynamic world while still maintaining high quality for critical systems. Building up the required automated tests is a challenge for any new application, but even more difficult when we consider the large existing code base many organizations have. With many of these systems running the key back end systems figuring out a way to automate the tests effectively and efficiently is critical.  

With the latest delivery of IBM Z Virtual Test Platform available now, we have not only added additional capabilities for doing your early integration testing, such as support for, but have made the addition of the IBM Distribution for Galasa to provide a fully supported platform for your extended testing capabilities. Galasa.dev is available as an open source solution for testing your end to end application from a developer experience perspective.  

But let’s start with the beginning of the story about how this all came about. I spend a lot of time with clients in their DevOps transformations. This is a large cultural change, and includes updating the tooling used to enter the 21st Century. Moving to a current and familiar source code manager such as Git and current pipeline tools such as GitLab (see the latest announcement) with full integrated deployment with UrbanCode Deploy is a great step, but how do you actually move faster with higher quality. This is accomplished with automated testing. Back to the story, one particular customer I have been working with had developed this great pipeline but now they needed automated testing.  We had a great conversation about what’s the right level of unit testing and came to the point of understanding that we needed to work at the program level and we had to come up with a way without having to recompile and a way of easily capturing the stubs. When I returned back to the lab, I  provided a challenge for the developers, to do this full stubbing with the need for a recompile. Out of that, we developed IBM Z Virtual Test Platform. We have spent the the last year working with clients in their environments to expand this capability to truly allow automated testing for traditional mainframe applications. IBM Z Virtual Test Platform is now the backend for our ZUnit capabilities as well allowing us the extended capabilities it provides. When we first shipped June 2020 we had CICS Db2 support. Now it has been greatly expanded, including CICS, Db2, IMS, MQ, VSAM, QSAM... for the full list of support go here.

What does Z VTP do for you?  It allows you to run your transaction or batch flow and capture all the middleware calls for playback. With the test case generated with it’s associated data file, you can now replay that any time, in the build process, by an individual developer as they make changes. It will show you the impact of the changes being made by showing the mismatches in the data flow. Using this record and playback, developers can work on areas of code in total isolation from not only others, but from middleware stack entirely. This also facilitates the building of test for the existing applications to show they continue to work as they did. 

There are many different uses for VTP outside of the main development use case such as testing a Compiler upgrades, or recompiling programs as copybooks are changed to keep consistency. Having VTP as part of the build process allows for regular verification of changes to insure that there is not unintended impacts. 

If you haven’t taken a look at VTP, now is the time to take a look at new latest capabilities including the new test case that can be managed in the SCM along with the code changes. 

The story behind Galasa.dev is again a view to customer feedback, the IBM CICS team has evolved over the years, modernizing their process and practices. As part of this they focused on automated testing for the CICS product itself. This gave them the ability to increase quality and decrease time to delivery. Clients asked how they achieved this and wanted their experienced shared with the broader community. This is the advent of creating the open source project Galasa.dev. This framework is the base that allowed the CICS team to transform their testing practices, but doing it via Open Source, we drive additional community involvement. It really is designed and built as a framework to support the extensions and the open source model. However, we understand clients want support for capabilities as well. This release of Z VTP provides the IBM Distribution for Galasa (Zip Download) which provides support for the included capabilities, this will continue to grow as Galasa grows.  

Learn more IBM Z Virtual Test Platform. Watch the video overview of the Automated Test Framework on IBM Z