Last week we addressed the need for a sound business case for DevOps and make sure you have the needed support from all stakeholders. Today we would like to give a global view on what can/needs to happen to have most benefits of a DevOps journey.
To give a global view we like to refer to following report from Forrester: “the Digital Transformation Needs Mainframe DevOps”, by Kurt Bittner and Robert Stroud, June 20, 2016. In that paper they address the key technologies you need to consider to enjoy all possible benefits from a DevOps journey:
| Technology | Capability enabled | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| IDEs for enterprise application languages | Use modern development practices, including syntax completion, code checking, and integrated debugging | Greater developer productivity, higherquality code, and larger resource pool |
| Virtualized z/OS development and test environments | Obtain fresh z/OS test environments without waiting and without using mainframe resources | Higher test coverage at signi cantly lower cost; higher-quality test results by eliminating shared test environments |
| Unit test automation for enterprise applications | Test code modules as they are developed or changed to provide developers with earlier feedback | Greater developer productivity, higher-quality code |
| Service virtualization | Simulate production systems and services in test environments | Reduced cost and time to provision test environments; improved parallel development of services |
| Continuous integration | Build, integrate, and test code as soon as it is delivered to a source repository | Greater developer productivity, higher-quality code |
| Static code analysis tools | Analyze the quality of delivered code | Greater developer productivity, higher-quality code |
| Release automation | Reduce or eliminate manual effort when moving software between environments | Reduced cost, improved reliability |
The point I want to make is that to have a complete solution you need to address several elements. Although we don’t address them all ourselves with our IKAN ALM for z/OS solution, we make sure that we integrate or can take advantage of all elements.
Example
During our Build (compile) process we can include a JCL step that will be used to run your automated tests. Or when you use an Eclipse like IDE we can launch compiles or even deploys (promotions) to test environments. So when doing DEVOPS, make sure you address all important and relevant elements.
With IKAN ALM we will make sure that our mainframe developer stays in his comfort zone and we will take care of the compilation and deploy steps, be it on one Z:OS, a number of z/OS machines or a number of LPAR’s. How do we do that? It's all in our next post.
Continue reading in our next post: Mainframe modernization, our architecture
About the author
Hello, my name is René De Vleeschauwer.
Throughout my career I've been responsible for the development of enterprise software. Since 12 years I've been leading the development of IKAN ALM, an open DevOps framework.