In IT, change is relentless, a constant. The persistent clamour for innovation, improvement, and customer satisfaction drives businesses forward, and sets IT’s ever burgeoning agenda.

Down in the engine room of IT delivery, application delivery, new capabilities, regulatory changes, validation against new platforms and software releases, customer-requested enhancements, and the innovation roadmap all fight to make it into the next release cycle.

Yet what shapes and scaling the contents of the next delivery is often dictated by a far more prosaic reality: bandwidth and resourcing.

How many testers, with how much institutional and technical expertise, and how many test-cases (and associated tests) are required to validate the latest stream of updates? With textbooks claiming that testing comprises over 40% of the entire resource allocation for software development projects, testing both efficiently and correctly is an operational imperative.

In many large enterprises, the core function of testing is often beset with difficulties. Access to the right environment, skills, and tools, configured in the right way, is often restricted, the administrative effort and expense of provisioning those environments hampering their availability. The desire to move more validation earlier in the development cycle fails if there is nowhere to shift it to. Similarly, automation faces a reality check that it counts for nothing if there’s no environment in which to run automated tests. This situation is especially true in the mainframe world, where z/OS environments are typically heavily guarded commodities, and availability a carefully regimented process.

This all results in limited availability for mainframe testing efforts, with little contingency and almost no flexibility. Testing windows are fixed, and requests for change to the process take months. Which means if tests fail and a fix / retest is required, it will likely be delayed until the next test window, which could be weeks away.  

Little wonder that a recent mainframe market survey revealed that 79% of mainframe teams felt that tooling was hampering the business, while 88% said “existing environments did not fully meet their delivery needs”. In many cases, that is putting it kindly.

A Journey to QAtopia

Imagine a situation whereby a testing or feature team can provision their own environment, whenever they need it, for as long as they need it, correctly configured, to run their QA phase.

Imagine, too, that the same environment can be replicated exactly to greater members of the team to allow further hands-on activities of the same environment, or that more processing power can be devoted to batch-intensive testing cycles. And that the decision to add more users or more power can be made at will. Imagine that!

What mainframe delivery leaders want is the freedom, the flexibility, and functionality to kick-off testing whenever the need arises, with the ability to scale out to use as much processor power or user access as the testing activity warrants.

Revolutionizing Mainframe Testing

After decades of struggling with the challenge of mainframe testing bottlenecks, the flexibility and self-service required by today’s business value streams has finally arrived. And the solution is elegantly simple. Instead of waiting for the mainframe test resources, why not use your own? An on-demand z/OS environment, replicable and scalable to the size of the testing task, available for whatever duration is required, is now part of the mainframe delivery toolbox, in the form of PopUp Mainframe.

PopUp Mainframe offers mainframe software delivery teams

• Pre-configured z/OS environments including operating system, subsystems, applications and (masked) data, primed and ready for a test run
• Flexibility to replicate a preconfigured z/OS instance to ensure everyone who needs it has access to the same environment, great for BMS/MFS/Java online/UI testing
• Flexibility to replicate the environment to ensure processor-intensive testing phases can scale out across dedicated mainframe IFL or x86 machinery, perfect for batch testing.
• Integration with modern mainframe DevOps tools to enable teams to harness testing software (e.g. Galasa, COBOLCheck) and other testing frameworks
• The ability to save and restore entire z/OS environments to enable rapid test restarts, perfect for iterative dev/test processes.  
• A fully flexible environment where the solution is charged purely based on the time it is in use, that is both cost efficient and great for sustainability.
• In-built facilities to manage, monitor, and control z/OS environments to streamline administration and maximize efficiency.

Learn More

Accelerating the mainframe delivery pipeline – including testing – is no longer a pipe dream. Mainframe service delivery now has access – literally and figuratively – to the technology that provides the freedom, flexibility and functionality to meet today’s aggressive value delivery targets.

Learn more about our testing solution, and the new PopUp Mainframe Flex Edition here. www.popup-mainframe.com