COBOL Check can be used on anything that runs on COBOL, whether it is on Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, z/OS or power system. Dave Nicolette, Programmer and Chair of Open Mainframe Project‘s COBOL Check, explains that it acts like a mock as the program runs outside of the real environment enabling you to run your tests on any platform. The unit testing tool is designed to take out all the external resources. From there, when developers are ready to do a higher level of testing where you need to access databases, files, or need to run in a KICKS environment, then you can upload the code and run it on z/OS. Nicolette discusses further in this video how COBOL Check can be thought of as being the bottom of the test pyramid, since unit testing is very fine grain testing with no dependencies on anything external to the code.

Guest: Dave Nicolette
Projects: COBOL Check | Open Mainframe Project (Twitter)
Show: To The Point
Keywords: COBOL, Mainframe

About Dave Nicolette: Dave Nicolette, Programmer, is the Chair of Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Check project.

About COBOL Check: COBOL Check is a unit testing framework for the COBOL language. Good unit testing frameworks exist for most mainstream programming languages, but not for COBOL. We want to provide this kind of tool for COBOL developers.

About Open Mainframe Project: Open Mainframe Project was founded in 2015, as a focal point for deployment and use of Linux and Open Source in a mainframe computing environment. Open Source is the collective thread within leading organizations that look to leverage their technology infrastructure as a competitive advantage. The mainframe design principles of security, stability, scalability, and performance are important to these leading organizations, and having the mainframe interoperable in a hybrid infrastructure enables leading organizations to realize its benefits. Open Mainframe Project believes this is best achieved as a community through open source.

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.