After Halloween - when I had to deal with a last-minute fix to a broken light saber, and the holidays coming around the corner, I tend to wonder where 2021 went. The year seems to have briskly advanced despite less travel. The team at IBM Z DevOps spent the year developing and working at our homes, Bed and breakfasts, parents’ homes and wherever our family ties and situation demanded.
The one thing that hasn’t changed with the pandemic is the work with and for our customers. We have been working with our sponsor users for all the products in the IBM Z DevOps portfolio; Testing has continued to be an area of focus. We have reinvented how we work on our test products, spending more time with customers and incorporating customer feedback as we develop. We continue to believe in the idea of providing our customers with true “unit” testing for COBOL and PL/I, tests that are developer-led, independent of the environment, repeatable and fast.
Today, I am happy to talk about the new ZUnit test features that are available with the latest version of IBM Developer for z/OS, made generally available on Oct 29 as mentioned in Gerald’s blog -
What's New in IBM Developer for z/OS 15.0.3. While we have been delivering changes every quarter, this is a major release.
1. You can now test IMS BMP COBOL programs accessing Db2 or DL/I databases. ZUnit supports manual data entry or recording of data to create these tests and runs the tests totally independent of the test environment - IMS and Db2. As with our other unit tests, these testcases are COBOL programs that can be stored in the SCM and run easily as part of a Dependency Based Build.
This is our first IMS support and a big thanks to our sponsor users for the collaboration!
2. We have been working to ensure that the unit tests are totally independent. With 15.0.2, it is possible to record and stub out QSAM files for COBOL programs. In 15.0.3, we have extended file support to VSAM KSDS files. This eliminates the need to provide external files to a unit test ensuring that the tests can run in any z/OS environment requiring only the application and test load libraries.
3. In March 2021, we made available the Batch PL/I support based on the Dynamic Test Runner and have been working on building and improving this support. You can now test Batch PL/I programs accessing files or Db2 with ZUnit, using the recording feature to capture data for Db2 and program linkage sections.
4. We have also added a number of customer requests for enhancements (RFEs) this release, including an improved automation for recording data for Batch programs invoked via a JCL Procedure, Enabling test data entry for FILLERs and non-unique data names and supporting COBOL programs that have a mix hyphen and underscores in the data items.
5. Lastly, we have been looking at ways to simplify workspace setup. If you are using a modern SCM like Git or Engineering Workflow Management(EWM), ZUnit run configurations can be setup at a project level and stored as a json file in the SCM, allowing them to be easily shared across workspaces.
[Note – Z Open Editor has been prototyping with zapp files. You can read them about it
here]
It has been a busy year and as always, we look forward to hearing from you.
We are approaching almost two years into the pandemic. We have all proved time and again that each one of us is resilient and strong. I am thankful to the team and everyone around me. A gentle reminder to everyone to take a break and enjoy your holidays and family time. Happy Fall!