Original Software Now Supports Mainframe in TestDrive-Assist

May 13, 2008 Alex Woodie

Organizations that house mainframes to process their data can now test their 3270 applications using tools from Original Software, the software company announced last week. Demand for mainframe support among its customers led Original to support IBM big iron hardware, the company says.

TestDrive-Assist, which Original formally launched about 14 months ago, enables organizations to test their software using a mix of manual and automated processes. With the software, much of the development of actual test scripts is still coded directly by hand, which for years has been the traditional way of performing functional and regression tests.

But TestDrive-Assist surrounds this manual core with a slate of automated features, such as test plan setup, results tracking, and end-to-end auditing, thereby alleviating testers of as much of the grunt work as possible, without forcing them to move to fully automated testing (for which Original is still a big proponent). Original says people can start using TestDrive-Assist with only 10 minutes of training, and claims the software reduces testers’ workloads by one-third or more.

Support for 3270 applications in TestDrive-Assist enables customers to test their mainframe applications for a range of problems and glitches that can occur during standard development or maintenance activities, just as customers previously used the software to test applications running on i OS (formerly i5/OS), Windows, and the Web. The new release brings support for functions such as screen and input capture, performance statistics, spell-checking, test status, audit tracking, test plan import, results storage, and reporting, according to the software vendor.

Original executives say they were surprised at the demand for mainframe support in their products. “While the rate of development on legacy applications has dropped in favor of Web interfaces, many of the world’s most critical applications are still based on legacy systems and any changes which cannot be properly tested represent an unacceptable level of risk to today’s CIO,” says Colin Armitage, Original Software’s CEO.