Bringing Contemporary Development Practices to the Mainframe Environment

The mainframe is making a comeback. The older generation is
leaving the workforce, and there are billions of lines of production
Cobol code to maintain. Not only that, but IBM's mainframe
modernization program means exposing core data assets via APIs, which
will require significant refactoring of existing applications. Besides
the legacy side of things, the Z platform has evolved into a robust
cloud infrastructure host, with native support for Linux and KVM.
There's a good change you'll be adding the mainframe platform to your
portfolio of skills. But younger professionals don't want to drop back
to a raw green screen interface and the bare-bones TSO/ISPF editor.
Let's take a look at some of the development tooling that's coming of
age to support Cobol and mainframe development. We'll see a developer
setup based on VSCode, the IBM Z Open Editor, and Zowe, as well as a
unit testing framework called Cobol Check that provides fine-grained
microtesting capability that has been missing from the mainframe
toolkit until now.

Our Speaker: Dave started his career working on IBM mainframes in 1977. He shifted focus to emerging technologies in the late 1980s and early
1990s, and later became active in the agile and lean software
communities. He's an advocate of TDD and other XP practices. As an
agile technical coach, he tries to include the "true back-end" in
agile transformation and coaching work. Now he's returning "home" to
the mainframe, and bringing with him the development and testing
techniques familiar to Java, C#, Python, and Ruby developers, but
largely unknown to mainframe developers.