Roadmap to Success

  • Define Your Success
    • Define the market and scope of the new products
    • Define how IT will support the new products
    • Define the target devices and technologies
  • Unit Testing Legacy Code
    • Introduce Test Driven Development to COBOL design paradigms
    • Work with your team to develop unit tests around existing code
    • Design the JCL infrastructure to run the unit tests
    • Defines current functionality
    • Run tests repeatedly before, during, and after development
    • If any test fails, you know you have a problem immediately
    • The code is only as good as the unit tests
  • Refactoring Existing Code
    • Large programs may need to be broken up into functional units
    • Change of programming culture from large application jobs to independent steps
    • Appifying existing codebase to isolate key functions for use by apps
    • All unit tests must run successfully.
    • Unit Tests may determine refactor/code reorganization points
  • Unit Testing new code
    • Agree upon Unit Tests during spec process
    • Define what constitutes a passing test and a failing test
    • Write all unit tests prior to coding
    • Start with a blank slate of failing tests, then write code until each test passes