CA enhances Mainframe application quality, testing tools

CA has announced new versions of three mainframe application quality assurance and testing solutions that help organisations leverage their legacy application investments within a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment.

By enabling customers to more effectively test and troubleshoot mainframe applications - both as self-contained applications and as components of end-to-end Web service-based infrastructures - the newly-enhanced solutions speed up problem resolution, improve service levels and promote application quality.

"To gain maximum business benefits from their mainframe legacy applications, customers are upgrading and repurposing them to support Web services that can be extended to employees, business partners and other end-users," said Mark Combs, senior vice-president of CA.

"CA is addressing this pressing need with quality assurance and testing tools that provide outstanding value by ensuring optimum performance and availability in today's complex service-oriented enterprise IT environments."

CA InterTest for CICS r8 and CA SymDump for CICS r8 exploit the capabilities of IBM CICS Transaction Server release 3.2, which enables both traditional mainframe transactions and Web-based applications to be efficiently integrated into an SOA environment.

CA InterTest for CICS r8 and CA SymDump for CICS r8 provide debugging capabilities and fault analysis for IBM CICS Transaction Server features that support Web services such as channels and containers for 64-bit storage. The capabilities enable application developers to leverage traditional mainframe applications in new environments.

In addition, the new support that CA InterTest Batch provides for nested DB2 stored procedures helps developers debug code that is critical for extending legacy applications into Web services and SOA environments. By providing insight into simple as well as nested DB2 stored procedures - which are increasingly used by Web services providers and their customers - CA InterTest Batch r8 makes it much easier for application developers to ensure the quality of applications before they are rolled out into production.

All three solutions also provide program source-level integration with other CA management products, including CA Software Change Manager for Mainframe (formerly CA Endevor). This integration enables developers to speed problem resolution and debugging by ensuring they are working with the latest versions of whatever program they are testing. Powerful and intuitive menu-driven components make all three solutions easy to use for developers with all levels of mainframe experience.