Continuous integration is the practice of merging all developers' work in progress to a shared mainline, implemented in such a way that it triggers an automated build with testing. It involves critical development activities that focus on solution development and pipeline flow through pre-production environments. Applying DevOps thinking, practices, and tooling in this segment of the value stream enables rapid development, frequent code integration, built-in quality, and compliance.
Embracing standard tools and processes like Git and GitOps in a consistent way across the enterprise, and automating where possible, empowers an organization’s development practices to be more efficient and effective in delivering software. The use of cloud native development tools and practices enables hybrid developers to embrace parallel development and automate builds and testing across multiple platforms both on premise and in the cloud. With standard tooling, teams can attract new talent, innovate faster and more effectively deliver business value.
Explore the solutions below to help your enterprise achieve higher business agility by improving release cycles, and automating test environment configurations and deployments, while safeguarding quality.
Updated 3-day free trial: IBM® Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS®
Modernization starts with discovery. Why? With tens of millions of lines of code, hundreds of dependencies, and dated documentation, architects and developers can spend weeks or months trying to understand the impact of changes, with no guarantee the updates won’t have unintended, rippling effects. Using an enterprise class discovery tool like IBM Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence (ADDI), you can perform a deep dive analysis of application boundaries and interdependencies as well as resources, databases, variables and more. ADDI provides up-to-date, consumable information about your mainframe software assets and resources, allowing you to confidently plan your changes.
To learn more, see Discover and plan for z/OS hybrid applications.
Developers want a cloud-native experience when creating or updating z/OS applications, including COBOL, PL/I, High-Level Assembler (HLASM), Java, C/C++, and REXX programs. With IBM solutions, essential developer capabilities such as edit, build, and debug are available across different IDE options and can be run on-prem or on a public cloud. Developers also get interactive access to z/OS systems and integration with modern SCMs such as Git.
IDE options are available to you based on where you want to code.
Developing z/OS applications on-prem
For developing z/OS applications on-prem, choose from:
- Microsoft® VS Code, available in IDzEE and Z and Cloud Mod Stack
- Red Hat® OpenShift® Dev Spaces, available in IDzEE and Z and Cloud Mod Stack
- Eclipse, available in IBM Developer for z/OS (IDz) and IBM Developer for z/OS Enterprise Edition (IDzEE).
Developing z/OS applications on a hybrid cloud
For developing z/OS applications on a hybrid cloud (IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, AWS) using a browser, IBM offers a cloud-native experience using Microsoft VS Code in Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces (available in IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack and IDzEE).
For additional guidance on selecting the IDE that is right for you, see Choosing an IDE client.
After making changes to your code, it’s important to ensure dependencies are addressed. Using IBM Wazi Analyze, developers can quickly discover the relationships among z/OS application artifacts and understand the impact of changes they want to make. IBM Wazi Analyze is designed for the developer to perform a rapid, graphical analysis on your local branch of code.
Working on prem and prefer Eclipse? See Developing z/OS applications with Eclipse.
Working on prem and prefer VS Code?
- IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack customers see Developing with IBM Wazi for VS Code.
- IDzEE customers see Developing with IBM Wazi for VS Code.
Working on a hybrid cloud using a browser and prefer OpenShift-based VS Code with analyze capabilities? See Developing with IBM Wazi for Dev Spaces.
An integrated pipeline is the backbone of the value stream. To unleash productivity, IBM empowers teams to use a single pipeline to orchestrate the development, integration and deployment of an application across multiple target platforms and environments.
Open source tools like Git, Jenkins and Artifactory are becoming de facto standards for powering
- Understand application boundaries to create Git repos at the application level.
- Determine the right Git workflow for your teams.
- Integrate your build process into your enterprise-standard CI pipeline with the quality gates configured to deliver the most secure, high quality software quickly.
- Install IBM Dependency Based Build (DBB).
- Customize zAppBuild.
- Create a
CI/CD pipleline.
For help setting up a CI/CD pipeline or adding DBB your existing one, request help from your sales rep to reach out to our DevOps Acceleration Team.
Organizations worldwide are embracing DevOps to transform their end-end development processes, establishing a highly automated pipeline. Automation isn't enough. Investment in good application-specific test tools is required, as well, to enable best practices like shift-left testing, where unit and application integration testing occur earlier in the pipeline process, allowing problems to be discovered sooner.
Automated, shift-left testing can help accelerate delivery of higher quality Z-powered, hybrid applications. Enterprises can benefit significantly from reduced risk and costs, and confidently deliver to production faster whether providing new capabilities or hot fixes to those mission-critical applications.
IBM solutions ranging from unit testing to early integration testing and easy provisioning of test environments, along with open source testing frameworks, work together to extend the continuous integration process.
To learn more, see Automating and shift-left testing z/OS hybrid applications.
- Understand the phase of automated testing that would benefit your organization the most (unit, integration, regression, and so on).
- Gather the team needed to implement automated, shift-left testing (developers, testers, and systems administrators).
- Create a project plan for implementation with dates and responsible parties identified.
When adopting Git as the single source of truth across the enterprise, teams want to increase the pace of application
deployments into test and production environments and need tooling to make this possible. IBM Wazi Deploy is a scripted
deployment tool that drives z/OS application deployment leveraging
Python and
Ansible® and can easily be integrated
into a
A typical deployment begins after the successful build of the various components of an application using a tool like IBM Dependency Based Build (DBB). The output of the build is packaged and deployed into a target environment. IBM Wazi Deploy allows a DevOps engineer to declaratively define a set of deployment templates, known as deployment methods, that describe the steps to deploy the various artifact types that make up the z/OS application. Based on the contents of the package, it retrieves the appropriate deployment methods to generate a deployment plan that carries out the deployment into a target z/OS environment. IBM Wazi Deploy provides a set of default deployment methods for both Python and Ansible that can be customized.
To learn more, see a diagram that describes the IBM Wazi Deploy workflow.
With the Python option, the deployment steps run on z/OS. If the application is being deployed using Ansible, IBM Wazi Deploy generates and executes the deployment plan in a Linux environment and then deploys the application to the target z/OS environment using Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z.
To learn more, see Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z.
For those using a traditional SCM, to learn more about how UrbanCode Deploy can be used to deploy into your test or production environments, see z/OS considerations for UrbanCode Deploy.
Read more about how to get started with IBM Z Cloud and Modernization Stack.
Read more about how to get started with IBM Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS.
Read more about how to get started with IBM Developer for z/OS Enterprise Edition.
Read more about how to get started with IBM Z Development and Test Environment.
Read more about how to get started with IBM Virtual Dev and Test for z/OS.
Read more about how to get started with IBM Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence.
Read more about how to get started with IBM Fault Analyzer for z/OS.
Read more about how to get started with IBM File Manager for z/OS.
Read more about how to get started with IBM Debug for z/OS.
Stay current with IBM Wazi Developer by following blogs, discussions, events, and videos.
Stay current with and IBM Developer for z/OS Enterprise Edition by following blogs, discussions, events, and videos.
Stay current with IBM Z Development & Test Environment by following blogs, discussions, events, and videos.
Read a tutorial about building a pipeline with Jenkins, Dependency Based Build, and UrbanCode Deploy.
Join the value-add DevOps Acceleration Program (DAP) to move faster with your transformation.
See how IBM Wazi Developer can empower developers to develop hybrid applications, spanning IBM Z and multi-cloud platforms, using a standard DevOps toolchain.
See how you can use IBM Wazi Developer for Workspaces and IBM Wazi Developer for VS Code to connect to the host, navigate z/OS resources, edit COBOL programs, and run user builds.
When you think about cloud-native development, think about IBM Z, because they really do go together.
Learn about IBM Z Open Debug for debugging COBOL and PL/I applications. See how to install a set of VS code extensions that provide editing, building and debugging functions.
Check out videos for the various Z Application Development tools.
Listen in as Chris Sayles and others discuss with Z DevOps experts how IBM is embracing open source technologies, making the mainframe more accessible, and designing new and better ways of developing and operating for the cloud-native and veteran community.
3-day free trial: IBM Application Delivery Foundation for z/OS
3-day free trial: IBM Z Development and Test Environment
3-day free trial: Bring Your Own (BYO) IDE for Cloud Native Development
3-day free trial: Agile Testing for z/OS Applications
3-day free trial: IBM Application Discovery and Delivery Intelligence
Work smarter and minimize risk by discovering application insights and make changes with confidence.
Simplify life for developers building hybrid cloud applications with a cloud native development experience for z/OS.
Transform z/OS hybrid application testing for continuous integration.
A single flexible platform with the common tools and capabilities to modernize z/OS® environments and applications.
The Related solutions section was updated.
The name was changed from Developer experience with hybrid cloud for IBM Z to Continuous integration for the hybrid cloud developer experience.
Much of the page has been rewritten, including the Introduction, Big picture, and How to get started sections. Resources have been added to the Technical resources section.
The Automate and shift-left test z/OS applications content solution was added to the Documentation and content solutions tab of the Technical resources section.
Information about using Wazi Analyze to discover and analyze relationships between z/OS application components has been added, including a new Analyze tab in the How to get started section.
The title of this content solution has been changed to better reflect the content.