Guest: Louisa Seers (LinkedIn)
Project: Open Mainframe Project (Twitter)
Show: Mainframe Matters

The Galasa Project, a new project that has been announced by the Open Mainframe Project, aims to solve some of the problems users and testers encounter with manual testing on the mainframe.

In this episode of TFiR: Mainframe Matters,  Louisa Seers, Chair of the Galasa Technical Steering Committee for Open Mainframe Project, talks about their new project and what challenges it is trying to solve.

Key highlights of the video interview are:

• Seers talks about what’s behind the unusual name of the committee. She gives us an introduction to the project and how their key focus is solving problems users have with the manual testing that they have to go through every day.
• The Galasa project was initially developed to solve testing problems within IBM itself as doing end-to-end integration tests was becoming increasingly difficult. Steers talks about the project’s evolution to becoming open source and how Galasa works.
• Seers talks about her background working in cloud and how Galasa provided an opportunity for her to test and access the mainframe without knowing it. She talks about where the project fits with other projects and how it shares the modernization values of the Open Mainframe Project.
• Although Galasa is being officially announced as part of the Open Mainframe Project as there was an open source variation previously, the project has already garnered some interest. Steers discusses the community around the project and the key focuses of gaining more of a conversation around testing and how other companies and users can extend it.
• Seers tells us about some of the companies who are currently involved with the Technical Steering Committee, such as Broadcom and Rabobank.
• Seers explains that they are waiting for adoption by the Open Mainframe Project before officially releasing their first version. She talks through the roadmap and how they are moving onto being able to access Galasa through the CLI, since initially access was via Eclipse.
• As Galasa is able to screenshot all the way through a test plan, it makes an ideal testbed for users currently using manual spreadsheets. Seers would like to encourage people to get involved to see if there’s anything that can be improved from a usability perspective. She also talks about the opportunities to extend Galasa into other applications.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.