Has anyone come across any workable approaches to implementing test-driven development (and potentially behavior-driven development) in/for COBOL applications?
An ideal solution would enable both unit and integration testing of both transactional (CICS) and batch-mode COBOL code, sitting atop the usual combination of DB2 databases and various fixed width datasets.
I've seen http://sites.google.com/site/cobolunit/, and it looks interesting. Has anyone seen this working in anger? Did it work? What were the gotchas?
Just to get your creative juices flowing, some 'requirements' for an ideal approach:
Comments welcome on the validity/appropriateness of the above requirements.
Just a reminder that what I'm looking for here is good practical advice on the best way of achieving these kinds of things - I'm not necessarily expecting a pre-packaged solution. I'd be happy with an example of where someone has successfully used TDD in COBOL, together with some guidance and gotchas on what works and what doesn't.
This means the following problems in such a TDD approach: More test code than the implementation code. Not easy to design tests before the implementation is done. Implementation refactoring breaks existing tests.
Test-Driven Development starts with designing and developing tests for every small functionality of an application. TDD framework instructs developers to write new code only if an automated test has failed. This avoids duplication of code. The TDD full form is Test-driven development.
The evolution of Agile development has introduced many pragmatic practices for delivering quality software at high speed. Test-Driven Development (TDD) is one such practice that is now recognized as an efficient approach that drives positive results.
Testing Techniques in Agile Software Development TDD, BDD and AMDD are the techniques in software testing that can be applied to any methodology. TDD is Test-Driven Development. The unit tests are written first, then a code is written to make the tests pass.
Maybe check out QA Hiperstation. It could cost a lot though (just like every other mainframe product).
It only used it briefly a long time ago, so I cannot claim to be an expert. I used it to run and verify a battery of regression tests in a COBOL/CICS/DB2/MQ-SERIES type environment and found it to be quite effective and flexible.
I would say this could be one of the pieces of your puzzle, but certainly not the whole thing.
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