Getting Started

This topic tells you when and why you would use COBOL Server for Unit Testing.

Note: Be aware that the person who purchased this product has had to sign a license which states that you may use this product for testing only, and not for development work. If you are uncertain as to whether you will need to do development work, we recommend you speak to the person who purchased the product to see if you need a different license.

The standard Visual COBOL development environment is used by COBOL programmers to conduct their development and unit testing on a Windows workstation, whereas the COBOL Server for Unit Testing environment is used by non-developers to conduct other pre-production testing within the COBOL Server for Unit Testing environment on a central Windows server.

You use COBOL Server for Unit Testing to test mainframe applications which have been compiled and set up for execution within the Visual COBOL IDE. It removes the need to use the mainframe for every aspect of application testing. It can be used when there are issues related to conducting testing on COBOL applications, against applications running on testing LPARS on z/OS.

These issues might be related to costs, amount of time taken to reset databases on the mainframe, or just the time it takes to complete tests using the existing MIPS allocated to testing LPARS.

COBOL Server for Unit Testing lets you test mission-critical mainframe applications more efficiently and more cost effectively using low-cost Windows server capacity before conducting final testing on z/OS, before applications are released into production. Typically, your integration build team will work with your development team to set up and run applications within COBOL Server for Unit Testing on your central Windows test server, as follows:

Visual COBOL is used to recompile application source code for execution on Windows and make the data subsets available locally.
The development team then ensures the testing teams understand how to start the applications within the COBOL Server for Unit Testing environment.
The QA team can then in turn conduct tests against the applications running in the COBOL Server for Unit Testing environment, as opposed to executing the tests against the applications running on the mainframe.
Applications running within the COBOL Server for Unit Testing environment on Windows behave just as they would on the mainframe, so you can perform a wide variety of pre-production testing activities on low-cost commodity hardware rather than on the mainframe.

The remaining documentation is intended for developers rather than testing teams, because as explained above the nature of use of this product is such that the developers will set up the applications and then pass them on to the testing teams to complete the pre-production testing.