This article is based on reporting originally published by eWeek on July 18, 2018, covering Compuware announcements made the same day.
The Mainframe Is Not Going Away
For many in the DevOps world, the mainframe feels like a relic — a machine that belongs to a different era of computing. The reality is more complicated. According to data center industry group AFCOM, roughly half of all companies with data centers operate at least one mainframe. IBM remains the dominant hardware vendor, with Unisys as a secondary player. For high-transaction workloads, data analytics, and large-scale scientific processing, mainframes continue to be the platform of choice in major enterprises — particularly in banking, insurance, and government.
That staying power creates a real engineering challenge: how do you apply modern software delivery practices — continuous integration, automated testing, rapid iteration — to a platform built around COBOL, PL/I, and Assembler?
Detroit-based Compuware has staked its business on answering that question. The company is positioning itself as the primary partner for enterprises that want to bring Agile and DevOps discipline to their mainframe operations.
Why Mainframe DevOps Is Hard
The core tension in mainframe development is generational. Many of the engineers who built and maintained these systems are retiring, taking decades of institutional knowledge with them. Incoming developers — often experienced in Java, Python, or C++ — may have little or no exposure to COBOL or IMS (Information Management System). Yet the applications they are inheriting are frequently poorly documented and deeply complex.
In traditional mainframe shops, this combination of complexity and knowledge loss makes rapid iteration risky. Without automated unit tests, a developer making changes to an unfamiliar COBOL program has limited ability to verify correctness quickly. This pushes teams toward long release cycles and heavy manual testing — the opposite of what DevOps requires.
Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley framed the urgency clearly in comments to eWeek:
“The mainframe goes back a long time, and the realities of having to do software development in ways that are continuously improving in terms of efficiency and in quality are now requirements; these are absolute imperatives to CIOs. In order to do that, you have to bring agile and DevOps into your mainframe platform. Compuware is the only mainframe partner that can help them do that.”
— Chris O’Malley, CEO, Compuware
What Compuware Announced in July 2018
On July 18, 2018, Compuware announced three significant moves — an acquisition, platform enhancements, and a new partnership — all aimed at expanding automated unit testing on the mainframe through its Topaz for Total Test platform.
1. Acquisition of XaTester from Xact Consulting A/S
Compuware acquired XaTester, a unit testing tool developed by Danish firm Xact Consulting A/S. XaTester enables developers to create unit tests for programs written in COBOL, PL/I, and Assembler, covering both batch and CICS-based applications.
CICS (Customer Information Control System) is significant here. It is the transaction processing middleware of choice for many of the world’s largest financial institutions and insurance companies, valued for its high integrity, performance, and scalability. Until this acquisition, automated unit testing for CICS-based programs was a meaningful gap in Compuware’s toolchain.
2. Enhanced Topaz for Total Test: IMS Support
Compuware expanded Topaz for Total Test to include automated unit testing for IMS (Information Management System) batch and transactional applications. IMS support is particularly important because contemporary developers frequently have little or no hands-on experience with IMS code, making manual validation slow and error-prone.
These enhancements build on Topaz for Total Test’s existing capabilities, which already included:
- Unit testing for COBOL batch applications
- Integration with Jenkins for CI pipeline automation
- Integration with SonarSource SonarQube for code quality analysis
- Integration with Compuware ISPW for source code management and deployment
3. Partnership with Parasoft
Compuware announced a partnership with Parasoft, a vendor specializing in automated software testing. The initial deliverable is an integration between Parasoft SOAtest and Topaz for Total Test. This integration allows developers to test API calls between mainframe and non-mainframe systems — an increasingly important capability as mainframe applications are expected to participate in modern service-oriented and microservices architectures.
Why Unit Testing Is the Keystone
Unit testing — the practice of validating small, isolated units of code automatically — is a foundational enabler of modern software delivery. On non-mainframe platforms, it is essentially assumed. Developers working in Java or Python have mature frameworks (JUnit, pytest, and many others) that integrate cleanly into CI/CD pipelines.
On the mainframe, this has historically been difficult. Compuware’s strategy with Topaz for Total Test is to give mainframe developers equivalent capabilities — so that unit tests can be created, run automatically on code changes, and surfaced through the same toolchain used for other platforms.
The benefits are standard DevOps outcomes applied to a non-standard platform:
- Earlier defect detection: Problems are found at the unit level, before integration testing or production deployment.
- Faster iteration: Developers can make incremental changes and verify them quickly, reducing the cost and risk of each change.
- Living documentation: Well-written unit tests describe expected behavior, helping new developers understand unfamiliar codebases.
- Safer knowledge transfer: As experienced mainframe engineers retire, automated tests preserve behavioral expectations that would otherwise exist only in human memory.
The Broader Topaz Platform
Topaz for Total Test sits within Compuware’s broader Topaz suite, which is designed to give DevOps practitioners a visually intuitive environment for working with mainframe applications — regardless of the application’s age, complexity, or state of documentation. The suite is intended to be accessible to developers who are not mainframe specialists, lowering the expertise barrier for teams that need to maintain or extend mainframe-based systems.
Compuware’s stated goal is a unified DevOps toolchain that treats the mainframe as a peer participant alongside cloud and distributed systems — not a silo requiring entirely separate processes and skills.
The Competitive Landscape
Compuware’s position in this market is distinctive. On the language side, Micro Focus is the primary commercial custodian of COBOL tooling, providing compilers, runtime environments, and development tools across both mainframe and distributed platforms. IBM itself provides development tooling through its Z Open Development initiative and related products. Compuware’s differentiation is its focus on the DevOps workflow layer — automated testing, source management, and toolchain integration — rather than the language runtime itself.
Whether this positioning is sustainable over the longer term depends on how quickly large enterprises actually adopt Agile and DevOps practices on their mainframe estates, and whether competing vendors or open-source initiatives close the capability gap. As of the 2018 announcement, Compuware was characterizing itself as the only vendor fully committed to this specific problem.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Engineers
- Mainframes remain operational in a large proportion of enterprise data centers, particularly in financial services and insurance.
- The skills gap between retiring mainframe specialists and incoming generalist developers is a real risk that DevOps tooling can partially mitigate.
- Automated unit testing is the critical enabler: without it, rapid iteration on mainframe code is too risky to practice reliably.
- Compuware’s Topaz platform integrates with Jenkins, SonarQube, and other standard DevOps tools, allowing mainframe workloads to participate in cross-platform pipelines.
- The Parasoft SOAtest integration specifically addresses the API boundary between mainframe and non-mainframe systems — a growing concern as enterprises modernize architectures without fully replacing mainframe backends.