December 2023

To:           Brightside/Test4z Customers

From:      Broadcom’s Test4z Product Team

Subject:  General Availability Announcement for Test4z 1.0

On behalf of Broadcom, we appreciate your business and the opportunity to provide you with high-quality, innovative software and services. As part of our ongoing commitment to customer success, we regularly release updated versions of our products. Today, we are pleased to announce that Test4z 1.0 is now available.

Unit testing is the foundation of the quality process – get it right and quality code results; get it wrong and the process fails. Test4z enables teams to “get it right” by using well-known best practices like code coverage at the true unit level (e.g., COBOL paragraphs) while easily reusing and maintaining the tests. Simple for developers to understand and use, including with VS Code, Test4z requires no additional tooling.

Help reduce your overall development costs and increase confidence in code changes by building quality into your process with Test4z.

The Test4z provides the capabilities for unit testing, regression testing, and code coverage metrics.  In addition, it provides the capability to record program execution. The recording feature aims to speed up unit test creation and automate regression testing under replay.

Initial features for Test4z 1.0 include:                                                           

• Unit testing of COBOL paragraphs
• Support for COBOL Batch applications (CICS support in development)
• Mocking of program calls, data sets, and Db2 calls
• Line level code coverage reports
• Recordings of program runs in human-readable format
• Instrumentation to record hard-to-test program path
• Automated regression testing under replay
• Virtualization of program calls, data sets, and Db2 under replay
• Command Line Interface (CLI)
• Visual Studio Code extension

We also encourage you to visit the Test4z product information page at Support and Tech Doc.

You can download your copy of Test4z online at Support where you can also utilize the case management system. To install your product, follow the installation procedures at Tech Doc.  If you have any questions or require assistance, contact Support.

Should you need any assistance in understanding these new features, or implementing this latest release, contact your Mainframe Business Specialist who will connect you with Broadcom’s Mainframe subject matter experts or reach out directly to the Product Manager at [email protected]. To connect, learn, and share with other customers, join and participate in our Brightside Community.

For a list of Mainframe Education courses recommended by role, please visit the Learning Paths and select the desired product. We update courses based on functional impact as well as high demand; therefore, courses created from previous releases may apply to the current release.

Please review our End of Service / End of Life Policy at Broadcom Maintenance Policy Handbook.

Thank you again for your business.