Automated Testing

Testing is a critical phase of any modernisation project and typically accounts for over 50 percent of the entire modernisation effort. Although key business logic is retained through modernisation efforts, the underlying applications are adapted to work within a new target operating environment. Thus, a detailed validation of the migration is extremely important, and the best means of achieving that validation is with thorough testing.

Testing is often burdensome to customers because subject matter experts are tasked with documenting step-by-step use cases for replication in the new environment. These subject matter experts are power users who have a deep working knowledge of the legacy operating environment and are often business-facing and non-technical. This combination of circumstances can result in oversight and miscommunication in test execution, which adds significant time and effort to modernisation projects.

Our Automated Testing solution provides customers with a tool to trace actions in online applications on the mainframe using IBM PCOM (or another TN3270 emulator). It also offers a means for recording, executing, and comparing batch jobs across the source and target operating environments. This automation removes the human element from key activities, reducing the potential for miscommunication and decreasing the time it takes to develop and execute comprehensive test cases.

Batch testing

Using the Automated Testing solution, mainframe assets, including source code and job scheduler definitions, are populated into our Modernisation Platform-as-a-Service (ModPaaS), which is integrated into the CI / CD test pipeline.