IBA Group’s DevOps Team Presents at SHARE Fort Worth
The SHARE conference, one of the major events in the mainframe industry, took place in Fort Worth from February 23 to February 28. Our DevOps team were among 1,300 participants who gathered to educate, share, and connect. The conference featured 500+ technical sessions and hands-on labs on enterprise IT hot topics such as security, open source, DevOps, and cloud.
Presentations
Our team gave two presentations at the conference. IBA Group’s presentation DevOps for DevOps aimed to show that DevOps engineers, just like other developers, feel the need to have VCS for their processes, automatic build, and auto testing for CI/CD pipelines. It is especially true for the mainframe, where DevOps involves a great deal of custom code. The presentation was well received. It was nice to get the feedback not only inside the SHARE network but also on LinkedIn and Twitter.
IBA group told about technical and cultural solutions for building DevOps on the mainframe in the presentation zDevOps: What We Do, How We Do on February 25. Many last year’s participants were looking forward to find out about the project progress in the past four months.
Hot Topics
This year’s hot topics were DevOps and open source. New technologies open up the mainframe to the new generation of developers. With automation and DevOps, Devs and Ops start working as one team. As a result, you have better visibility, more frequent releases, and happier customers.
Hybrid cloud is another popular technology that makes the mainframe more affordable while maintaining the same security level.
The quick-paced development of open source projects like Zowe was at the center of attendees’ interest.
Sessions
Our team focused on DevOps and test automation sessions. The presentation about Galasa framework Solve Your DevOps Pipeline Headaches With an Open Source Framework for Test Automation by William Yates from IBM UK Laboratories was a real blast. IBM developed the framework released in open source git-repository. Galasa makes the mainframe more accessible to non-mainframers. It is an excellent opportunity for young developers to play with the mainframe outside the native environment. Extensible nature and open source make it easy to integrate with other testing tools of your choice. At the moment, the team are discussing the applicability of the framework to their projects.
Another interesting session was from Rosalind Radcliffe and Suman Gopinath from IBM, titled True Unit Testing for z/OS Application. They were talking about the importance of unit testing at lower levels on developers’ side. The more unit tests you have, the less tests you will need at further levels. ZUnit is an automated testing tool delivered in IBM Developer for z/OS. With time, its scope will widen beyond Cobol and CICS and it will help attract more users.
The presentation Lean Mean Machine – Keeping the Lights on for Agile/DevOps by Jeremy Hamilton focused on how DevOps engineers should define and deliver the best value to the customer. For this purpose, Dev and Ops teams, and the customer need to keep close contact to level the expectations and desired outcomes on the way.
Expertise
The mainframe lies at the very core of the IBA Group’s expertise and the mainframe journey dates back to 1993 when the company was founded as an IBM partner. IBA Group has special expertise in mainframe software development, both system and applied, and in legacy systems migration. More than 400 professionals are engaged in mainframe system and application development and support. Currently, IBA is a Platinum Business Partner of IBM.