COBOL turned 60 years old in September 2019. A quote from Derek Britton, Micro Focus global director of product marketing, application modernization, and connectivity, reminds us how ubiquitous COBOL is in our daily transactions with :

“Any time you phone a call centre, any time you transfer money, or check your account, or pay a mortgage, or renew or get an insurance quote, or when contacting a government department, or shipping a parcel, or ordering some flowers, or buying something online at a whole range of retailers, or booking a vacation, or a flight, or trading stocks, or even checking your favourite baseball team’s seasonal statistics, you are interacting with COBOL.”

But Testing COBOL Mainframes remains a challenge and lacks focus in the testing world. The mainframe is the backbone of many organizations and contains critical business rules or logic. Only Testing Mainframe code via the front-end or RestAPI is not effective. To truly achieve DevOps or Agile delivery Mainframe Test Automation is critical. My journey would include the following:
• The test engineer and leads should have a quality mindset, not just focus on testing.
• The approach and design of quality assurance
• The ineffectiveness of testing mainframe through front-end
• The process or method to integrate Mainframe into DevOps/Agile Environment
• Skills required to test Mainframe.
• It’s time to go back and amend our oversight to revolutionaries Mainframe testing.