Original reporting sourced from ADTmag. Quotes and technical details attributed to Compuware product manager Steven Kansa and CEO Chris O’Malley.
Overview
Compuware announced the integration of its machine-learning-driven analytics service, zAdviser, with its mainframe CI/CD platform, ISPW. The combined offering is designed to give enterprise DevOps teams actionable, data-backed visibility into mainframe developer productivity, code quality, and delivery pipeline performance — areas that have historically been difficult to measure in mainframe environments.
At the same time, Compuware expanded ISPW’s integration with Git, enabling distributed developers to work with mainframe source code using familiar version-control tooling and workflows.
What Is zAdviser?
zAdviser is a free analytics service available to Compuware customers. It applies machine learning to correlate developer behaviors with key performance indicators (KPIs) drawn from DevOps activity data and Compuware product usage data. The goal is to surface patterns that distinguish high-performing development practices from less effective ones — and to make those patterns actionable for engineering managers and team leads.
According to Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley:
“The truth is, in large organizations, they often don’t know much about the quality and effectiveness of their developers. Are they awesome? Are they average? We’ve accumulated all this data from working with customers over decades — huge amounts of it across many customers — and patterns emerge in that data around how the work gets done. So, we can use machine learning and pattern recognition to ask, what are the ways of working that are associated with high performance.”
Chris O’Malley, CEO, Compuware
The Core Problem: Mainframe Developer Productivity Is a Black Box
Compuware product manager Steven Kansa identified two overlapping challenges that the zAdviser/ISPW integration is designed to address:
- Productivity visibility: Many large enterprises have no reliable way to measure how their mainframe developers are operating day-to-day, or where productivity bottlenecks exist in the delivery pipeline.
- Senior developer attrition: A significant wave of experienced mainframe developers is approaching retirement. As less experienced engineers take over, organizations need better tooling and data-driven guardrails to maintain quality and velocity.
“We work with a variety of different customers across the globe,” Kansa told ADTmag. “One of the most common challenges we see among those organizations is the need to understand developer productivity. They’re asking, how are our developers operating today, and what can we do to help improve their productivity?”
What the zAdviser + ISPW Integration Delivers
Combining ISPW usage data with zAdviser’s software delivery KPI data produces dashboards that visualize constraints in the delivery pipeline and highlight where refactoring or process changes would have the greatest positive impact.
Technical Debt and Code Quality Questions
- Which modules are contributing most to technical debt?
- Where should code revitalization and refactoring efforts be focused?
- Where are the constraints that, if improved, would have the biggest positive impact on future delivery flow?
Developer Productivity KPI Questions
- How much time is spent developing and testing code versus waiting in queue?
- How long does production-ready code sit before being promoted into production?
- What is the elapsed time from a developer’s first code checkout to that code running in production?
- How are regressions and fallbacks affecting overall development flow?
“This is about finding the patterns that make you more productive,” Kansa explained. “What are the things that people are doing that help improve throughput efficiency and quality? Where is the technical debt within your system, and potentially obsolete code?”
Expanded ISPW and Git Integration
Alongside the zAdviser integration, Compuware announced expanded ISPW support for Git-based workflows. This is a significant move for organizations that want to bring mainframe development into the same CI/CD pipelines used for distributed application development.
Key capabilities of the ISPW–Git integration include:
- Automatic synchronization: Changes committed in Git are automatically synchronized back into the mainframe environment, eliminating manual handoffs between distributed and mainframe codebases.
- CI/CD pipeline parity: ISPW’s automated build, deploy, and fallback capabilities can be triggered from standard Git-based pipelines, giving mainframe code the same automation coverage as distributed code.
- Consistent visibility: Using the same version control conventions across all platforms gives engineering leaders a unified view of the enterprise codebase.
This integration is particularly valuable for developers who lack deep mainframe experience. By working in Git — a tool they already know — they can contribute to mainframe projects without needing to master ISPW’s native interface from day one.
Industry Analyst Perspective
Jason Bloomberg, president of analyst firm Intellyx, commented on the strategic significance of the announcement:
“Reducing technical debt inherent in mainframe applications is essential for any organization looking to incorporate mainframe applications into their CI/CD pipelines. With the new analytics from zAdviser, along with modern mainframe CI/CD tools like ISPW and its integration with Git, it’s possible to break down the silos separating mainframe development from the rest of the DevOps effort, thus reducing technical debt and extending the speed, quality, and collaboration benefits of CI/CD to the mainframe.”
Jason Bloomberg, President, Intellyx
Why This Matters for Enterprise DevOps Teams
For enterprises where the mainframe processes mission-critical workloads — financial transactions, insurance claims, airline reservations — bringing mainframe development into the modern DevOps fold is not optional; it is a competitive necessity. The zAdviser and ISPW combination addresses several real structural problems:
- Measurement gap: Without KPI data, engineering managers are flying blind when making staffing and prioritization decisions for mainframe teams.
- Skills transition risk: As experienced mainframe developers retire, machine-learning-derived best practices can help encode institutional knowledge into data-driven recommendations rather than losing it entirely.
- Toolchain fragmentation: Git integration reduces the friction of managing code across hybrid architectures, lowering the barrier for modern DevOps practices to reach the mainframe.
“Companies can transform their most critical back-end platforms by enabling a preferred developer experience, automating manual-process constraints, integrating with best-in-class tools, and inspiring a culture of continuous improvement guided by software delivery KPIs of velocity, quality, and efficiency,” O’Malley said.
Key Takeaways
- zAdviser is a free, machine-learning-powered analytics service for Compuware customers that surfaces developer productivity patterns from DevOps and product usage data.
- Integrating zAdviser with ISPW gives mainframe teams dashboard visibility into technical debt, code quality, and pipeline throughput KPIs.
- Expanded ISPW–Git integration lets distributed developers work with mainframe code using familiar version-control workflows, with automatic synchronization back to the mainframe.
- Together, these capabilities aim to close the tooling and visibility gap between mainframe and distributed DevOps pipelines — a long-standing challenge in large enterprise environments.