Love or loath mainframes, they’re always there and the dilemma facing anyone building modern systems down the decades in finance, utilities and manufacturing has been to help the legacy keep pace.

Mainframes hold key customer and business data, a fact that’s seen these systems get successively wrapped by yet-more layers of “modern” technology, thereby cementing their position.

With that in mind, Compuware has upgraded its Topaz mainframe DevOps suite to make the mainframe fit more smoothly into the Continuous Delivery lifecycle.

The updated Topaz would, Compuware promised, quickly get new developers up to speed in building “seamless mainframe-inclusive DevOps pipelines.”

What are the changes?

Mainframe and Java projects, preferences and configurations can now be grouped into sets under Topaz Team Profiles and shared with team members. Compuware has worked, too, to make the experience of using Eclipse projects more like that of a Java developers’, it said.

Also new is a Jenkins plugin built by Compuware to work with the mainframe’s Job Control Language. The idea is this will bring mainframe processes into the DevOps integration and delivery pipeline, and be faster, more reliable and more secure than conventional FTP.

Finally, Topaz for Total Test has been updated to work with CICS. The change means Total Test can create virtual CICS commands thereby eliminating the need to access active CICS test regions. CICS test cases can be run automatically through Compuware’s Jenkins plug in.