Compuware Corporation, a mainframe software company, delivered its fourth major release of Topaz—a solution suite intended to help enterprise customers to tap the potential business value of their IBM z Systems. The latest release features Topaz Runtime Visualizer (Topaz RV), which provides visibility into the often-complex interactions between mainframe programs. This visibility helps developers understand, modify and troubleshoot older or poorly documented mainframe code.
With Topaz RV, developers can generate an intuitive map of the external calls a program executes during any specified runtime. Topaz RV also enables developers to drill down into a program’s external calls to see how often programs call each other during a runtime or the specific datasets a program accesses at each point in its execution. This insight helps them better pinpoint potential performance bottlenecks, inefficiencies and inter-program impacts.
Topaz RV also complements traditional source-code parsing, which itemizes all out-of-program calls written into an application’s code. By discovering and mapping only the program-to-program calls that actually occur during a live runtime of any developer-specified task—such as placing an order or running a monthly report—Topaz RV gives developers a “snapshot” of a program’s real behavior in the production environment under present conditions. The new Topaz release also enables developers of all skill levels to more quickly and accurately perform impact analyses by creating Java-like “projects”—logical collections of data sources—that is intended to help them discover and investigate dependencies across programs and copybooks, without having to move code off the mainframe.
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