white paper Towards the modern mainframe How Enterprise Developer can meet the future challenges of mainframe application development

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1 white paper Towards the modern mainframe How Enterprise Developer can meet the future challenges of mainframe application development

2 To thrive and survive in an increasingly difficult economic climate, organizations must gain market share and drive growth by continually delivering new and improved products and services. IT organizations play a pivotal role in meeting their clients business objectives. They operate in a constantly shifting landscape of new technologies, compliance demands and new ways of working as the business environment changes. They also have to achieve their clients business objectives against a backdrop of cost control and the relentless demand for increased efficiency and the two are rarely separate. Mainframe application development is a major activity in the lifecycle of critical IT systems. Many core IBM mainframe applications are home-grown using proprietary processes and mainframe-based technology. It makes sound fiscal, business, and technical sense to develop, enhance and improve these core business functions and the systems that support them as an IT priority. However, the mainframe is an inefficient place to carry out the work. Mainframe-based IT strategies can be constrained by the complexity of existing business applications and the environment that has grown around them. Future challenges, today Developing and delivering core applications on the mainframe can be difficult and time-consuming. The applications can be as complex as the development tools are limited and capacity constraints mean that time is wasted waiting for programs to compile or jobs to execute. Worse still, as fewer people are prepared to learn proprietary and unfamiliar development tools, recruiting new talent to deliver the work has become a new and unwelcome challenge. Consequently the future of applications is in the hands of a decreasing pool of experienced but ageing programmers. So IT teams are increasingly being challenged to balance the essential now everything needed to keep the business functioning with future needs the innovation that will improve corporate performance. In short, to remain competitive today and sustain business growth tomorrow organizations must tackle critical IT challenges and promptly address factors that directly impact time to market. The To Do lists This thinking drives the decision-making on how IT organizations modernize mainframe application development and contemporary development practices. They must meet several fundamental business objectives: Deploy core applications that maximize business value. Provide business functionality at the lowest possible operational cost. Modernize systems according to business need without any associated risk. Build greater flexibility and operational efficiency into IT. Tangible technical requirements also need to be fulfilled: Distinctly increase development productivity and efficiency. Deploy industry-standard integrated development tools that can be used across the development team to make it easier to attract and cross-train new talent and unify mainframe development with the JAVA and.net development communities. Establish development practices which are highly customizable, to ensure that new development tools are robust enough to be integrated into the existing development life cycle, but flexible enough to support new development paradigms, technologies and platforms as business objectives change. Improve code quality through better application understanding, more efficient and extensive unit testing. A strong return on investment realised not only through developer productivity gains but real reductions in mainframe development costs. PAGE 1

3 Tackling specific mainframe development challenges Micro Focus believes that at the heart of a renewed and more streamlined mainframe development process lies an unparalleled opportunity for faster ROI, improved productivity, reduced mainframe operating costs and open modernizing capabilities for mainframe applications. And we can prove it. Enterprise Developer is a powerful, integrated development environment (IDE) that provides agility and flexibility. It gives direct access to the new technologies and trends that tick many of these boxes. We will assess this in more detail in the Delivering Mainframe Development Efficiency section. Let us assess some of the core requirements for the application development team. Maximizing programmer productivity it is widely accepted that uniting development tools under an integrated development environment can improve productivity vendors estimate that using technology which allows developers to instantly detect syntax issues, quickly navigate around large complex applications, or includes features such as content assist, can deliver a 40% improvement. However, these productivity gains can quickly be eroded if developers remain completely reliant on the mainframe for resources. There is no opportunity to save on mainframe MIPS (Millions of Instructions per Second) consumption often one of the key drivers in changing development approaches. Flexibility is essential The application development process is typically complex with parallel development streams and multiple tools all integrated into, for example, the Eclipse development environment to ensure developers work efficiently, productively and are using the tool 100% of the time. Integrating non-standard tools and processes into a chosen IDE framework can be difficult and time-consuming. This often requires a new set of development skills and a full time resource to maintain and manage the resulting ad hoc infrastructure. The need for quality Providing programmers with the tools to ensure that quality is built into any change, and that errors are captured as early as possible is as important as maximizing their productivity in developing new functionality. Unit testing is the ideal phase to iron out bugs, rather than in the more expensive, later stages of the development cycle. For maximum expediency, developers must have a full unit test environment isolated from other developers. Additionally, they need to have access to advanced testing tools to look at code coverage analysis, problem diagnostics and just-in-time debugging for run time failures. Bridging the skills gap An existing problem for IT development management is the lack of integration across platforms, as knowledge differs across applications and programming languages. An inclusive development environment where developers were cross-trained in new applications and languages would lessen the skills gap. Skills flexibility is crucial in providing modernized mainframe applications, such that business objectives can be met by a single resource pool that possesses all the requisite application and language skills, and differences in process or technology are kept to a bare minimum. Collaboration and unification IT organizations have to respond to business requirements that were never envisaged when the original teams and processes were established. Web front ends, mobile apps, interfaces with 3rd parties are very real requirements that the existing IT structure struggles to cope with. Mainframe-centric COBOL teams and web design Java teams barely use the same vocabulary, let-alone the same tools or processes. This remains a pervasive challenge in today s environment. Supporting future IT modernization the development imperatives of today might be very different in a few years time. One thing is certain the pace of change is relentless and businesses are looking to derive as much value from their intangible IT assets as possible. On a practical level this means reusing and modernizing application portfolios that may currently reside on the mainframe. Can your development environment give you these options and provide you with flexibility and choice for you and your business programs going forward? Delivering mainframe development efficiency Through Enterprise Developer, Micro Focus delivers many technical and business benefits and meets these requirements. Let us assess why it should be at the top of the hit list for anyone looking to modernize their mainframe application delivery process. Powerful productivity yields dollar-saving development Enterprise Developer brings a step-change in productivity for the mainframe programmer. It supports a development model that complements and accelerates existing mainframe processes. PAGE 2

4 Enterprise Developer can integrate with the mainframe to the extent that development tasks can be driven from Eclipse but executed on the mainframe. Micro Focus believe it is ideal for hot fixes, quick changes, or mid project implementations, but the real efficiency gains and dollar-savings are to be made when as much of the development life cycle as possible occurs away from the host environment. Enterprise Developer provides a full-function mainframe development environment under Windows and consequently as much as 90% of the developer s time can be spent away from the mainframe. This realises significant savings and ensures developers under Windows experience no wait times or resource contention, providing them with the flexibility to maximize productivity gains. Enterprise Developer uniquely combines the flexibility to develop off the mainframewith the functionality to directly integrate on mainframe development within the same Eclipse IDE. It delivers choice as well as the advantage of being used across the development team to maximize programmer adoption, productivity and efficiency. Flexibility through integration Underpinning Micro Focus Enterprise Developer is a simple-to-use, centrallyconfigurable modeling capability where the customer controls the environment without costly setup or configuration effort. Consequently, workflow and development processes on or off the mainframe can be quickly integrated into the Eclipse environment without custom Java plug-in development. For example, full and flexible integration into mainframe source control is available and third party tools such as mainframe hosted debuggers and file editing capabilities can all be integrated into the IDE. This flexibility dramatically reduces the time to deploy Enterprise Developer and improves developer adoption, as familiar processes and tools can be integrated under a single environment and productivity gains are not compromised. Quality is built into development With Micro Focus Enterprise Developer, quality is at the heart of each activity. Enterprise Developer provides unrivalled COBOL application compilation and debug performance. Smart, contemporary editing tools make the job of cutting working code less error-prone than ever before. Because each developer has a full unit test environment running on their workstation, full batch and online unit and functional testing can be performed locally as many times as necessary without impacting on other developers work or consuming mainframe resources. The unit test environment is easily created and administered by the developers themselves and there is no need to copy system software or even databases down from the mainframe. Unit testing becomes fast, easy to implement and is conducted in such a way that programmers get full confidence in the quality of code changes they are making. Aside from the obvious benefits of saving mainframe test resources, harnessing Enterprise Developer to Micro Focus innovative Test Server platform brings more of the testing cycle to Windows. This enables users to bring more automation to the cycle, maximize test throughput and minimize time to market of critical business updates. Bridging the skills gap By providing a unified environment in which to cross-train developers, closer application and team integration can be established. Using Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs supports a single application view that supports Java and COBOL, simply by sharing the same development components. This resource flexibility provides better scaling and in providing modernized mainframe applications, as business objectives evolve. Unifying the development process Using industry standard tooling reduces the gap between the mainframe COBOL developer community and other developer teams. By supporting both the Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs, Enterprise Developer can unify the mainframe world with C#/.NET and JAVA and the JVM, enabling collaboration between developers as their language barriers are broken. Micro Focus is not prescriptive as regards IDE choice: built artifacts from either IDE can be shared between teams and development environments. Importantly the use of standard development frameworks means that non-cobol developers can quickly and easily adapt to the COBOL language without having to learn proprietary mainframe development tools, while it represents the very latest in development productivity for experienced mainframe COBOL programmers. Future IT modernization Enterprise Developer provides a unified development environment regardless of where that application may be deployed. While the target deployment platform may initially be the mainframe, Enterprise Developer includes all the tools required to easily adapt these applications to run in.net, on the JVM, web or cloudbased environments. It is this flexibility that enables maximum programmer productivity and quality and ensures choice in determining the platform or target architecture best suited to meet the needs of current and future business needs. PAGE 3

5 In conclusion... Modernizing mainframe application development is key to ensuring that IT can help organizations meet evolving business objectives. A renewed development process must provide core business functions at the lowest operational cost without associated risk. This includes key facets including improved code quality, greater flexibility in the mainframe development process, and better cross-group integration across development, to yield distinctive increases in development productivity and efficiency. This more open environment would then promote lower-cost training of new talent and unifying development across COBOL, JAVA and.net development communities. Enterprise Developer tackles these major IT challenges head-on by providing an unparalleled level of productivity, flexibility and collaboration in the mainframe development process. Industry-leading tooling unifies development approaches and provides a totally flexible environment with unrivalled mainframe compatibility. The highlyconfigurable development tools built in to Enterprise Developer and the flexibility within the development process itself enables customers to enjoy a swift return on investment, while remaining competitive and sustaining business growth. Enterprise Developer is at the heart of the Enterprise product set, a unique, comprehensive technology stack that modernizes z/os application service delivery. Innovative technology enables customers to optimize all aspects of mainframe application delivery, driving down costs, removing bottlenecks and accelerating innovation. For more information on our current mainframe solution, please visit About Micro Focus Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit: Micro Focus IP Development Limited. All rights reserved. MICRO FOCUS, the Micro Focus logo, among others, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Micro Focus IP Development Limited or its subsidiaries or affiliated companies in the United Kingdom, United States and other countries. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. WPTTTMM1012 PAGE 4