Compuware has introduced enhancements to Topaz, its mainframe DevOps solution for empowering next-gen developers to bring modern development best practices and third-party tools-of-choice to the mainframe. With these enhancements, the company says, organizations can more quickly get new developers up-to-speed and build seamless mainframe-inclusive DevOps pipelines.
“The next generation of developers can deliver extraordinary business value by applying their skills to mainframe applications,” said Chris O’Malley, CEO of Compuware. “Topaz gives these development artisans the familiar, intuitive, automated and richly functional environment they need—and prefer—to fulfill this critical mission and continuously improve in the measures of velocity, quality and efficiency."
With the enhancements, developers and testers can now more easily group both mainframe and Java projects, preferences, configurations and/or working sets into Topaz Team Profiles and share them with other individuals and teams. This sharing provides access to high-value knowledge that can be used to jump-start common tasks such as editing data, debugging programs, or running unit tests. Topaz’s use of Eclipse projects has also been enhanced so the mainframe developer experience is even more like that of a Java developer.
This knowledge-sharing is aimed at enabling new staff to become more productive in less time, while eliminating redundant work. It is also intended to ensure that mainframe teams consistently embrace best practices honed by more experienced developers.
A new Jenkins plug-in for Topaz also makes it easier to automate and integrate mainframe processes into a cross-platform DevOps pipeline. The plug-in enables DevOps professionals and release managers to execute Job Control Language (JCL), an essential scripting language that controls mainframe tasks such as setting up test data and directing programs to run, in their DevOps pipelines.
The Compuware Topaz Utilities plugin accesses the mainframe using a technology that is faster and more reliable than conventional FTP—which many consider an unacceptable security risk.
Compuware has also enhanced Topaz for Total Test, the premier automated unit testing solution for the mainframe, to support CICS—the mainframe’s dominant transaction processing technology. The patent-pending technology creates virtual CICS commands, eliminating the need to access active CICS test regions. The CICS test cases can be automatically executed through a Jenkins plugin.
More information is available at www.compuware.com.