Authored by Rich Larin, Shalini Mohan, Husein Shamshudin, Roland Koo
IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z accelerates mainframe application modernization
7 out of 10 IT executives agree that mainframe applications remain crucial to their business and technology strategies. Accelerating mainframe modernization is essential for helping businesses stay agile and competitive, and the mainframe shines when applications can take advantage of its powerful processing capabilities. However, ensuring that the performance potential of the platform is realized often depends on a skilled developer tuning their application to ensure it is optimized. These skills can be in short supply in some organizations, and for new talent joining mainframe development teams, it isn’t always clear how to deliver optimal performance.
Assisting developers and accelerating mainframe application modernization is the core purpose of the recently launched IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z, designed to support your developers throughout the application lifecycle— from application discovery and analysis to code explanation, refactoring, COBOL to Java transformation, and automated test generation for validation. Today, we are excited to announce the latest capability of watsonx Code Assistant for Z: Code Optimization Advice, which tackles the problem of performance optimization head on. This feature helps your development teams identify top performance issues in their code, enabling optimization and significant performance enhancements. Code Optimization Advice is expected to be generally available for clients from August 12th, 2024 in IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z version 2.1.
Introducing IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z: Code Optimization Advice
Code Optimization Advice is engineered to help your developers analyze their COBOL programs, get a prioritized list of performance issues, and provide actionable recommendations to resolve them, all within their VS Code IDE. With this insight, your team can focus on the the most impactful problems first, rather than guessing and wasting time on low-impact ones. The earlier developers can find and address performance issues, the more they save on time, money, and resources.
Code Optimization Advice also provides a detailed view of each performance issue, helping developers understand why it’s a problem, its scope of risk, recommended actions to fix it and the rationale behind these recommendations, with an option to go to the exact line of code to be modified (if it’s a source code issue), enabling a quick fix. You can also compare the performance of the original code vs. modified code and see the impact.
By reducing the learning curve and time spent detecting and fixing performance issues, Code Optimization Advice can help you boost developer productivity, educate junior developers, and make your applications more performant. Less time fixing performance issues means more time to write code!
How is this different from other performance tools?
Unlike many performance tools that perform static analysis of the source code and provide recommendations, Code Optimization Advice performs dynamic runtime analysis providing real-time data for your COBOL programs. Also, different from system level analysis tools that are designed for systems programmers, this capability is designed for application developers, by providing recommendations for code that they are working on before it is deployed, helping teams to shift-left in their development cycle. Shifting left in the development cycle not only helps you address performance issues early but can also reduce the costs and resources associated with fixing defects in production.
See how it works
The demo below showcases how performance issues can be found and solved faster with watsonx Code Assistant for Z.
Get started with IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z
IBM watsonx™ Code Assistant for Z is engineered to help accelerate mainframe application modernization by supporting developers with generative AI and automation capabilities. To discover how it can help your organization, schedule a live demo with an IBM expert or check out the interactive demo.
Join us at our next watsonx Code Assistant for Z webinar to learn more about Code Optimization Advice.