Written by Will Yates, Galasa Lead and STSM CICS Hybrid Cloud at IBM
No enterprise application consists as an island any more. Even applications created 40+ years ago, which originally were solely invoked from a 3270 emulator have been modernised to process inbound requests over a plethora of transport mechanisms. As these applications have evolved they have come to serve requests from other applications, which in turn have provided services to other applications or eventually the end user. Although the user might interact with a mobile application, eventually that application could end up driving an application running on the mainframe, the core for high throughput, secure resilient transactions.
As the applications have modernized so has the need to modernize the test processes that validate the quality of these applications. Where once a tester could ‘get by’ with a set of 3270 emulator macros they now need to adopt tools to drive, API’s, Web Pages as well as JCL, z/OS File IO etc. Although open source tools exist for some of these technologies, the mainframe has not always been well served by open source test tooling.
Furthermore these tools must not execute in isolation. An end to end integration test must both drive the system of engagement to validate the external interface, but must also validate that those actions were recorded in the system of record. This requires the tools used to implement the test must execute within the same test context.
Galasa not only provides mainframe test commodity by bringing a set of open source APIs to help a tester implement a automated z/OS test, but also a flexible integration framework to allow these APIs to execute within the same test context as a selenium script or JMeter API. This allows the tester to automate a z/OS test case as well as all the ways the enterprise application might drive that test.
By allowing 1st class integration for testing mainframe applications to integrate with other open- source tools, Galasa brings testing commodity to this set of business critical applications. With Galasa changes to these business class applications can now be easily validated, automatically as part of a CI/CD pipeline either in isolation or alongside the rest of the enterprise application.
Learn more about Galasa or get involved by joining the community – check out the community site here.
