Clerity, a provider of mainframe management solutions, announced enhancements to Clerity Universal Test Manager (UTM), an automated tool for creating, managing, and validating automated application test cases during large-scale mainframe migrations.

By eliminating time-consuming, iterative manual testing cycles, migration activities that used to take months to perform can now be completed in a matter of days, the vendor says. Cameron Jenkins, COO, Clerity Solutions, tells 5 Minute Briefing. The tool will support testing in both mainframe-to-mainframe upgrades and offloading mainframe applications to open systems, he adds. "While UTM was initially developed to aid the large testing effort associated with offloading applications from a mainframe onto open systems, it can also be used to test any 3270 or batch-based application residing on any platform," he explains. "This means that UTM can be used to test existing 3270-based applications such as IBM CICS and IMS, in addition to offloaded applications running on Unix, Linux or Windows.

Downtime and end-user retraining can be costly and detrimental to a mainframe migration implementation. To ensure a smooth production cut over, all end-user screens must be thoroughly checked and tested. At sites with significant online application investments, this task can involve validating thousands of end-user scenarios to confirm that there will be no service disruption when operations begin on the new open systems environment.

UTM also supports testing on applications or workloads offloaded to the mainframe specialty engines? "Yes, Linux on IBM System z application workloads can be driven using UTM," says Jenkins. "Clerity also has the ability to offload z/OS mainframe MIPS compute cycles running CICS, COBOL and batch applications to Linux on System z as well."

In the latest release of Clerity UTM, support has also been added for common ‘green screen' VT100/220-terminal-based applications, in addition to 3270-based applications commonly associated with CICS, IMS, Natural, and telnet-based mainframe programs. Batch job output reports, submission results and regression tests can be tested as well. Security has also been enhanced in Clerity UTM with the added support of secure SSH and SFTP connections.

More information can be found here.