Tag: cobol

Can contemporary lightweight software development and delivery methods “scale” in large enterprises without appropriate support for the venerable IBM mainframe platform? Thought leaders in the “agile” community seem to think so. For example, this proposed session on code isolation and automated testing for mainframe applications received almost no notice from the review team for the Agile 2015 conference. The two reviewers who noticed the submission seemed not to understand what it was about, or to see any relevance or usefulness in it.

It’s true that some large enterprises don’t have mainframe technology. Apple, Google, Amazon, and a handful of others built their businesses in an era when alternatives to the mainframe were plentiful. Those companies tend to be relatively uninterested in “agile” and “lean” methods, as they have come up with their own ways of doing things, and their financial position doesn’t lead them to believe they need to change. They’re probably right. If they were “dysfunctional” they probably wouldn’t be doing quite so well financially…a minor detail often overlooked by enthusiastic change agents.

However, the majority of larger enterprises have been around for decades. They have used computer technology all those years. The general pattern has been to layer new technologies on top of old rather than to migrate applications. Name a large bank or insurance firm that doesn’t have a significant investment in mainframe systems. Now explain how you would bring agility to those organizations just by setting up a few Scrum teams, applying good technical practices only to the outermost layer of their technology stack, and ignoring technical practices and tooling on the mainframe platform.

Continue reading Bringing TDD and automated testing to the mainframe platform