Sponsored by Broadcom

Are you working as hard as you can and still feel overwhelmed by the amount of work that needs to be done? Sometimes, working harder or longer hours just isn’t the answer. Often, the way to be more productive and achieve better overall results is to work smarter. Stepping back to look at the big picture lets us see the many opportunities to work smarter right in front of us.

For mainframe developers, there are avenues to deliver at a faster pace with higher quality by leveraging contemporary development tooling like VS Code, Git, and CI/CD pipelines. The best part? As you make progress, you’ll typically increase satisfaction with your job and work. This article will help you jump-start your journey to coding confidence by working smarter.

So, where do you get started? Begin with an open and honest dialogue with yourself — and with your team, if relevant. Seek to understand the current state of affairs and challenges with your development process. Here are some reflection questions to begin with:

• Are you struggling to replace deeply experienced developers with new-to-mainframe talent?
• Are you and your team spending hours to days simply trying to understand your codebase?
• Is quality an ongoing concern?
• Is setting up and breaking down development and test environments a bottleneck?

After you and your team have taken a close look at where you are spending your time and your needs, turn them into goals, and reach out to trusted partners like Broadcom that can share industry trends and best practices. As you are going to be making an investment to meet these goals, take some time to be specific on the key metrics today and your desired state. Assess your current state development process objectively and focus on the biggest obstacles to higher productivity. It’s through honesty and clarity that we’ll focus on the most impactful opportunities and ultimately provide the greatest benefits.

I believe in people. I believe when people are working on something they are passionate about, something they enjoy and they can see the impact of their work, amazing things are possible. I also believe in enabling people with education, tooling, and by involving them in the entire process. I believe in collaboration and continuous progress. At the same time, I am less motivated to do the same thing over and over again or to accept a super long path rather than breaking down barriers to create a new path. It is with this mindset that Broadcom will partner with you to help you achieve your goals.

Let me share some examples of how we have helped teams code with confidence.

Goal: Attract, onboard, grow, and keep newer mainframe developers.

Listen, let me just be blunt: to attract, onboard, grow, and keep newer, tenured mainframe developers the answer is VS Code. It’s the number one IDE in the world with over 14 million users. It’s consistently ranked #1 by the Stack Overflow survey. There are over 60,000 extensions bringing more power and flexibility to VS Code users, inclusive of mainframe developers. Most importantly, VS Code is well positioned for the future. It has a vibrant developer community and supporting ecosystem. It is the underlying editor/IDE for the hosted/cloud IDEs and new extensions appear in VS Code first.

For developers working on z/OS-based applications, Code4z offers a set of VS Code extensions just for z. Code4z enables developers to access code on the mainframe or in Git, navigate and edit both COBOL and HLASM, plus, debug issues with breakpoints and abend analysis while testing new code.

If you really want to attract new talent, you simply must enable developers to capitalize on the compelling developer experience (DevX) provided by Code4z. You can check out videos and, more importantly, try the hands-on workshop yourself to experience the benefits and ease of use — and level up instantly. The Code4z extension pack is available on the VS Code Marketplace.

Goal: Reduce the amount of time it takes to understand COBOL programs from an average of three days to less than half a day.

According to a Forrester Mainframe Application Developer Survey, developers spend more than three days to understand >5M Lines of Code. To accelerate understanding, an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant is an advantage. An assistant is able to consume the code and supply an English explanation of the code itself, making it exponentially easier for developers to understand the code, then make updates with greater confidence.

There are ample code AI assistants (large language models — LLMs) on the market, and the leaderboard is continuously changing. To train an LLM to be a COBOL expert, there must be COBOL code readily available. There is ample Java-Script accessible publicly. While COBOL itself is not proprietary, the business logic coded in COBOL is highly proprietary. As a result, COBOL code is not nearly so publicly accessible.

Broadcom is taking a pragmatic approach that can integrate and work with existing tooling to accelerate new team members’ code comprehension. We have multiple customers partnering with us to provide COBOL code and validate our approach before we release. We are happy to preview for you, and you are similarly welcome to try it for yourself in our Code4z workshop environment.

Goal: Level up on automation. Spin up dev and test environments automatically.

Many developers and testers spend hours upon hours putting together disparate pieces required to install and configure environments: ports, profiles, certificates, etc. There are options available to streamline and automate many or all of these pieces. Broadcom Ansible Playbooks are easy to use. z/OSMF workflows can be created. Enhancing existing automation scripts or automation rules can move you forward, too. The key here is to not start from scratch! There are available resources to get you jump started.

Goal: Show progress on quality — reduce the number of defects that reach production.

Every R&D leader recognizes the importance of resiliency and availability. They all seek ways to improve quality and reduce production issues. The conversation always leads to testing coverage. How well do you test? How complete is your test coverage?

Test4z, a developer-centric unit testing solution, enables teams to create small discrete tests and maintain tests the same way code is maintained. Automation initiates the running of the execution of the tests. Or, a command line interface (CLI) can be used to run tests as needed. Code coverage of testing is readily visible — as are the results of the tests.

Inevitably, when test code coverage is initially seen, the next question immediately becomes: where do we invest to incrementally improve?

Answer: It depends. Key considerations include:

• Is there a problem area that is resulting in incidents?
• Is there a specific business application that is of the greatest importance?
• Is there an application flow that is typically changed often?
• Is there an application flow that is about to undergo significant updates?
• Is there a new application flow?

Often, setting a standard of expected coverage for new or changed applications is a great way to make the desired progress.

What to avoid? Avoid investing in test coverage of applications that do not actually run. With WatchTower Application Profiler, you can view applications and key metrics about each, including the number of times they run and resource consumption.

Let’s Get Started

A representative from Broadcom will meet you where you are at and help you reach your destination. You don’t need to do everything at once. I encourage you to start, learn, show progress, repeat. Let’s partner to ensure you are continuously improving your DevX, productivity, collaboration, quality, and developer job satisfaction.

RESOURCES

Code4z Simulator – learn about the extensions.

Code4z Basics — A Guide for Architects and z/OS DevX Leaders – learn about the available resources.

Code4z Offers Two Paths to VS Code for Mainframe – explains the Quick Start and Complete Experience options.

Code4z Academy Workshops – sign your team up for a tailored workshop.

Code4z on the VS Code Marketplace – download and try.

Test4z: Unit Testing for Mainframe, with Confidence – add unit testing into the experience.