Blog post
COBOL Check! Exciting new development for the Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Programming course
Introduce unit testing through integration with COBOL Check!The COBOL Programming course team kicks off 2023 with an exciting session with their Open Mainframe sister project – COBOL Check!
In Part 5 of this webinar series, COBOL Programming Course Technical Steering Committee (TSC) members chat with their frequent special guest speaker Rune Christensen, a Lead Software Developer at Bankdata in Denmark and a co-lead of COBOL Check, a sister project in Open Mainframe Project.
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COBOL Check is a Unit testing framework for COBOL, enabling you to test sections instead of entire programs.
Rune’s organization in Bankdata is using the current version of COBOL Check based on Java programming from the past 9 months, and they used the previous version written in COBOL for three years. Test-driven development (TDD) and Test-driven learning (TDL) is a benefit of COBOL Check. You can refactor code, make test scenarios with sections, try things out, and learn content through testing.
How do you use COBOL Check, if you are a developer on a z/OS system?
It’s easy. Download the package from the COBOL Check website, and it's prebuilt for you. You can then write a JCL, giving your program and unit tests as input to the runner (COBOL Check), and it gives you the test results.
Rune says follow the three A’s of testing: Arrange, Act, and Assert.
Arrange your test (set up), Act (run it), Assert (get the result).
Bankdata is using the best practices of automation and continuous integration pipelines with inclusion of DevOps (Bitbucket and Jenkins). What does that mean? If a unit test fails, code cannot move into production.
Through the COBOL Programming course chapter "Testing and Debugging" (coming soon), you can learn more about these best practices and tools that can help developers get even better with COBOL code updates and maintenance.
Stay tuned as the COBOL Programming course members plan their future development roadmap of the COBOL Programming course with these enhancements.
The call-out to the huge community of learners is to contribute and be part of the project COBOL Programming course or COBOL Check Project.
Ready to start your COBOL journey? Dive into the COBOL Programming course.
This course is also available on the IBM Digital Learning Platform and Coursera.