Application development is becoming increasingly hybrid and complex, making accelerated delivery a key business requirement. To deliver high-quality results quickly, practitioners use continuous testing practices to shift testing to the left, automate and improve quality to reduce risk.
Recent insights from Gartner on automated software testing adoption and trends (link is external to IBM.com) reveal increasing growth “ready to use advanced automated testing such as DevOps and agile methodologies to drive growth. Even with these modern approaches, testing remains a significant challenge and CIOs require agile testing practices for z/OS® applications to enable rapid delivery of high quality. Because of this, adopting automated testing has become a top priority for software development teams looking to streamline their processes, improve quality, and accelerate delivery.
To meet the growing needs of our customers, we are excited to introduce the IBM Test Accelerator for Z, a revolutionary solution designed to revolutionize testing on the IBM Z®. This innovative tool accelerates the Shift-Left approach, enabling seamless collaboration between z/OS developers and testers through a unique experience.
Designed for IBM Z users who want increased agility, faster delivery times and higher software quality, IBM Test Accelerator for Z empowers developers and testers. It is designed to facilitate automated unit testing, early integration testing, and full integration testing, seamlessly integrating generated tests into automated builds as part of a continuous testing framework.
Developed in collaboration with IBM Research®, this tool includes the ability to automatically generate test data for difficult programming paths, significantly increasing code coverage and speeding up testing processes.
Unlike conventional testing solutions, IBM Test Accelerator for Z gives users and teams the freedom to quickly create isolated, non-production virtual environments that host IBM z/OS software and middleware locally using Linux® on Z. This simplified approach facilitates early detection of failures, thereby delivery time is reduced, costs are reduced and risks are reduced. These versatile features are designed to enable teams to adopt agile methodologies, left-shift testing and continuous integration practices within an automated pipeline.
Examples of user scenarios
IBM Test Accelerator for Z provides an intuitive user experience for developers and testers to generate automated unit tests and early integration tests through Eclipse® connected to IBM Developer for z/OS (IDz) and powered by IBM Dynamic Test Engine for z/OS. .
Unit test automation for z/OS developers covers network transactions and batch programs, client information management systems (CICS), and information management server (IMS) programs without the need to deploy application artifacts to target environments.
Developers can perform early integration testing by capturing a test from a transactional or batch program and running the test without having to deploy to target environments. Developers and testers can record and then create reusable and reusable integration tests based on Galas.
Companies can run tests on an isolated, customizable z/OS virtual environment of their choice, tailored to their needs based on business considerations of cost, availability, performance or security. These tests can be run in Linux environments on IBM Z or on x86-compatible systems, allowing verification of a specific change without unexpected impacts due to a shared environment.
Start
We thank our user sponsors for creating this “one stop shop” for z/OS testing together with us. If you can’t wait to start your journey, read the announcement or click the link on the product page for more information.
We are confident that you share our vision of simplifying the complex tasks of software delivery in this hybrid world. The barriers to fast delivery are falling and now you have the key to start the engine.
Explore the product page to learn more.
Register for the webinar “The Future of Test Automation for Hybrid Z Applications” on June 25, 2024.
Learn more about the IBM Test Accelerator for Z