Organizations are transforming their development processes and achieving better business outcomes by incorporating DevOps best practices like test automation and shift-left test. This approach prioritizes software and system testing early in the Software Delivery Lifecyle to help reduce or prevent significant problems down the road.

Incorporating continuous testing into DevOps processes provides several benefits to enterprises.

Better efficiency and higher-quality deployments: Continuous testing provides an automated method of managing quality assurance and reliable operation between workflows at each stage of the Software Delivery Lifecycle. With continuous feedback loops at different testing phases, from unit to user acceptance testing, developers can receive the actionable insight they need to improve their code before it gets deployed. This efficiency resolves disconnections between multiple DevOps team members and supports accelerated software delivery schedules.

Rapid error discovery and remediation for distributed projects: Today's modern development architectures are multifaceted and multilayered. Continuous testing helps development teams break down these complexities by incorporating a scalable, automated testing solution that significantly improves error discovery and remediation timelines.

Improved user experience: Advanced continuous testing methods can simulate a variety of unique use cases and troubleshooting scenarios and observe how users respond to them. The insight gathered from these simulations enables developers to remove the inefficiencies in the user interface earlier and avoid unwanted surprises after the application has been deployed.

Reduced costs due to development-related business disruption: Especially in large interconnected systems, an error in just one module of an application can have ripple effects that can cause unwanted downtime, negatively impacting productivity and the bottom line.

IBM has the expertise and solutions to help your organization develop a strategy to transform testing for your z/OS-powered hybrid applications.

Early development testing for z/OS enables team to automate the unit and early integration testing of z/OS programs written in COBOL. Developers can record tests for programs, transactions or batch jobs and run the tests prior to deploying artifacts to target environments. These tests are powered by the new Dynamic Test Engine for z/OS. These tests can be stored along with the code in the team repository, facilitating seamless integration into a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. The test data generation unit test feature generates test data automatically for those program paths that are difficult to create tests for. This improves code coverage. Early development testing for z/OS advantages include:

• Automated unit and early integration tests that runs in isolation without requiring a full middleware stack to enable a quick feedback loop
• Earlier detection of defects, which reduces costs and speeds delivery
• The ability to replay recorded tests in isolation, which simplifies debugging complex issues

• Pre-deployment, automated unit and early integration testing for batch, CICS, and IMS applications written in COBOL
• Automated data capture through recording to simplify the creation of tests
• Increased code coverage by creating test data for hard to test paths within the program

Early development testing for z/OS is a component of Test Accelerator for Z.

1. Read the early development testing for z/OS overview.
2. How to set up Test Accelerator for Z to unit test.

Debugging and code coverage are integral aspects of software development, and they go hand in hand with test to ensure together high quality, robust, and reliable applications which meet user expectations.

Debugging plays a crucial role in software development by identifying and rectifying errors and bugs within the source code. By utilizing debugging tools, developers can analyze the code systematically, pinpointing the origin of the problem and implementing fixes accordingly.

Code coverage is another essential aspect of software development, providing valuable insights into the efficacy of the testing process. Measuring the percentage of code executed during testing, code coverage helps determine which areas need further examination. A higher code coverage rate indicates that critical sections of the software have been sufficiently tested, thereby minimizing the likelihood of undetected bugs. Continuous monitoring and updating of test codes according to code changes are vital to maintaining optimal code coverage levels.

• Extensive debugging options – set breakpoints at statements, programs and conditions, run until a breakpoint is reached, view and change the values of variables and storage.
• Measure the effectiveness of your automated testing by using code coverage in conjunction with IBM Test Accelerator for Z to support shift-left testing initiatives.
• Debugging and code coverage available for z/OS applications written in COBOL, PL/I, C/C++ and Assembler.

• Read the blog on the new Code Coverage Tree View in z/OS Debugger 16.0.3.
• Listen to our webinar on simplify debugging complex problems in your z/OS application with automated testing solutions from IBM.
• Read the product documentation.

Integration testing is a crucial test phase that ensures that different software components of an application work together.

With Integration Test Builder for z/OS, a component of IBM Test Accelerator for Z, developers and testers can record a work flow through a z/OS application, and then generate automated integration tests. These tests run via IBM distribution for Galasa, an open, extensible, test automation framework purpose built for integration testing of z/OS applications that are components of larger hybrid applications. Integration Test Builder for z/OS advantages include:

• Quick, reliable recording of z/OS application flows from within the development environment using the Dynamic Test Engine for z/OS (an IBM Test Accelerator for Z component) to capture application activities.
• Automatic generation of deployable Galasa tests.
• Automated testing of hybrid application that include z/OS components.
• Support for IBM distribution of Galasa.

Post deployment, programming language independent integration testing of z/OS applications. For example:

• Tests that ensure that an order entry system integrates properly with an inventory management system.
• Tests to validate that application modernization activities such as a compiler upgrade, refactoring and/or rewriting do not impact integrations.

Integration Test Builder for z/OS is a component of Test Accelerator for Z.

1. Read the Integration Test Builder for z/OS overview.
2. Learn about recording, generating, and running tests.

Enterprises need on-demand, isolated environments to perform iterative, automated testing.

The On-demand Dev and Test environment for z/OS, a component of IBM Test Accelerator for Z enables enterprises to host z/OS using virtualized IBM® Z hardware on Linux running on x86-64 or s390x machines, supporting mainframe application demonstration, development, testing, and education use cases. The On-demand Dev and Test environment for z/OS tooling provides an API or UI web-based interface to create and manage images and allowing self-service capabilities to provision z/OS instances on Linux target environments.

The user can:

• Quickly spin-up test and development sandboxes with the same base image on isolated Linux on Z and x86 environments to scale horizontally and predictably.
• Enjoy a unified z/OS image creation and management experience across platforms.
• Deploy custom and standard z/OS images optimized with DevOps tools to x86 -64, s390x machines and IBM Cloud Wazi as a Service based instances.

• Drive new software faster, with higher quality, to production:
  • Shift-left testing
  • Work in isolation or parallel.
• Employee training and education on an economical and easy-to-build replicable environments.
• Easily test new z/OS, middleware and compiler versions or patches without compromising the real environment.
• Enable continuous integration and agile development methodologies for z/OS to meet changing business requirements.

On-demand Dev and Test environment for z/OS is a component of Test Accelerator for Z.

1. Get a quick understanding through the solution brief.
2. Read the latest blog.
3. Gain an in-depth understanding through the technical documentation.