Achieving DevOps Efficiency from Your Mainframe

Solution Guide

Guide

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Solution GuideAchieving DevOps Efficiency from Your Mainframe

From the outset it is worth explaining that this is not revolutionary think-ing. Organisations have always attempted to do things better, faster. It is as true of the time and motion studies of the previous century as it is of DevOps—to choose a more contemporary example—today. Whatever the label, the principle is the same; to improve operational efficiency using new thinking or technology.

Micro Focus has a 30-year background in helping our mainframe cus-tomers improve efficiency against a background of increasing IT com-plexity, by evolving their current technologies to meet future business needs. The progress from MFEEE to Enterprise Developer is the latest example of this evolution.

Enterprise Developer resolves genuine business problems by applying the core principles of increased efficiency through collaboration and unification—of unifying the development process through improving efficiencies in mainframe application development.

This overview briefing is supported by deeper resources that, together, represent a full how-to guide. Using extracts from our white paper, towards the modern mainframe, we outline the challenges and real-life options for meeting them using our technology. It is worth stressing that these increased efficiencies address many real-world problems facing our customers, including reducing time to value and the IT backlog. Further, our dedicated white paper, Real World DevOps for mainframe enterprises marries the contemporary application development philoso-phies such as DevOps to the mainframe experience.

This document is written as a problem-solving guide. We first outline the typical IT problem facing modern business leaders, the issue, describe

the scenario that would address it, namely—the resolution and wrap up how the move from MFEEE to Enterprise Developer would achieve it with the solution.

Meeting Today’s ChallengesLet us explore the key challenges facing today’s IT leadership in main-frame organisations.

Time to ValueIssue: Core applications and the processes captured in these business-critical systems are the lifeblood of any major enterprise. But years of IT innovation, growth of competitive advantage, rebalanced expenditure to support lights on activity—and other activities highlighted in our quick reference guide1 has added to a significant IT complexity and creates a challenge for anyone looking to achieve a faster delivery of value back to the business.

Resolution: To overcome the time-to-value challenge, efficiency is the catch-all panacea for dealing with multiple, complex issues. Tackling obstacles with application provision requires focus at various stages in the delivery journey. For example, the third step along the five-step path1 Micro Focus suggests focuses on improving development2, spe-cifically by “delivering flexible options throughout the development cycle to maximise efficiency and improve quality.” Uniting development under an integrated environment can boost productivity—by up to 40 percent.

Evolving Mainframe Development for MFEEE Customers The solutions created to tackle business challenges are constantly evolving. The one constant among them is to improve efficiency in the right places. Micro Focus understands that for our mainframe customers in general—and the Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition (MFEEE) community specifically—uncovering efficiency shortfalls and addressing them with the right technology and processes is pivotal to business success.

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1 www.microfocus.com/assets/time-to-value---a-quick-refere_tcm6-213847.pdf

2 www.microfocus.com/products/enterprise/enterprise-developer.aspx

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Risk MitigationIssue: Creating and developing robust, core applications is a complex process, and compromising on quality by failing to pick up errors suf-ficiently early in the test cycle is both inefficient and high-risk. When development teams are under pressure to deliver, quality can become a nice-to-have rather than an integral part of the process.

Resolution: Provide developers with advanced testing tools that offer code coverage analysis, problem diagnostics and just-in-time debug-ging for application failures to ensure that quality is built into any change and errors are captured as early as possible. Iron out bugs in the unit testing phase rather than the more expensive, later stages of the devel-opment cycle and give developers a full unit test environment isolated from other developers.

DevOpsIssue: DevOps is not, in itself, instantly transferable to the mainframe application development process. As we have said, DevOps3 is however a new label applied to the perpetual drive for efficiency. The term was born of the drive for more agile working among smaller development teams, but it is now firmly on the to-do list of IT Directors and senior mainframe development staff.

Resolution: Improving the efficiency behind the two elements that give DevOps its name, i.e. Development and Operations, would create a DevOps equivalent for organisations with a more complex IT profile, typically involving the IBM mainframe and older, COBOL applications working to a more functionally-separated4 model. Mainframe-centric COBOL teams and web design Java teams barely use the same vo-cabulary, let alone the same tools or processes.

Because like every efficiency-aware process, the mainframe model for DevOps depends on finding and addressing every issue individually. Because ‘mainframe inefficiency’ is not a single challenge to be ad-dressed in one hit; instead it is a question of identifying each bottleneck and resolving them incrementally depending on the business imperative. The Micro Focus mainframe model of DevOps is very closely aligned with our Enterprise Solution—a truly end-to-end process with demon-strable results.

Cost ManagementIssue: Application development is a major lifecycle activity for business-critical IBM mainframe-based IT systems. But these mainframe-based applications can be complex and development tools sometimes limited. Mainframe development requires time and money and these activities can be difficult and time-consuming. A renewed and more streamlined

mainframe development process would mean faster ROI, improved pro-ductivity, reduced mainframe operating costs and open modernising capabilities for mainframe applications.

Resolution: A powerful, integrated development environment (IDE) that provides access to new capabilities including instant syntax issue detection, content assist and better navigation for large, complex ap-plications, offers superior agility and flexibility for mainframe developers that means they spend less time reverting back to using mainframe resources, and more time using efficient toolsets.

IT BacklogIssue: Misunderstood as a term and under-resourced as a problem, the IT Backlog affects every organisation with an IT function. Any organ-isation adopting new systems and processes adds to their application complexity—and their backlog—drawing on precious resources better deployed elsewhere. With stagnant IT budgets committed to day-to-day business activities, there is little flexibility for reducing the backlog.

Resolution: Aligning a flexible and achievable backlog mitigation strat-egy with the appropriate solution, affected organisations can address their backlog and regain focus on future innovation. Maximising main-frame productivity to eradicate potential bottlenecks such as cumber-some, time-consuming development processes can reduce application delivery time by up to 50 percent and create the space and time needed to clear the IT Backlog.

Regulatory Compliance Issue: Organisations are under increasing pressure to comply with regulations set by industry bodies or government. Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) projects add non-negotiable, fixed deadlines to current IT workload. Meeting ever-expanding IT compliance targets with finite IT resources restricts the opportunity to launch more innovation-focused projects. Establishing an efficient, repeatable and comprehen-sive IT compliance strategy—underpinned by the technology that can deliver it—is crucial in achieving deadlines and freeing up resources.

Resolution: As our dedicated ‘business briefing’5 explains, streamlining the development of core system changes can go a long way to meeting regulatory compliance project delivery targets. Identifying the requisite code changes is crucial, especially in the absence of up-to-date system __________

3 www.jedi.be/blog/2010/02/12/what-is-this-devops-thing-anyway/4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_organization5 www.microfocus.com/assets/technology-the-compliance-enab_tcm6-

212029.pdf

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Solution GuideAchieving DevOps Efficiency from Your Mainframe

documentation. Smart technology will support the enterprise IT compli-ance lifecycle, enable collaboration across key GRC stakeholder and achieve compliance obligations and reduce the overall IT burden. Micro Focus proposes a ‘find it, fix it, test it’ process that can enable greater ef-ficiency in all mainframe delivery projects (including compliance-specific ones) by as much as 40 percent.

Skills and Outsourcing Issue: While regarded as separate problems, skills and outsourcing are inextricably linked by many factors. Potential outsourcers6 may have a development resource shortage or have lost key subject mat-ter experts—both are key factors behind the predicted skills shortfall7. The lack of shared knowledge across applications and programming languages also prevents easy integration and therefore, the replace-ment of key staff.

Resolution: An inclusive development environment, where developers were cross-trained in new applications and languages would mitigate skills concerns and improve outsourcing6 activities. It would also increase skills flexibility, crucial in modernising mainframe applications, enabling business objectives to be met by a single resource pool with all the requisite application and language skills, where differences in process or technology are kept to a bare minimum.

The SolutionSome of the people reading this will be considering adopting a DevOps approach to improving operational efficiency. This is not easy for the enterprise; extrapolating a process intended for, say, 20–30 people using contemporary platforms to a number 10 times that size working from a mainframe simply does not work, so this is not a DevOps solution per se. But neither is Enterprise Developer a peripheral technology. It brings percentage increases to every stage of the application develop-ment lifecycle and addresses many business challenges in the process.

The efficiency improvements realised when 90 percent of the developer’s time is spent away from the mainframe equates to genuine dollar-saving improvements and improved time to value.

Code-cutting is less error-prone and testing becomes fast, easy to implement and offers programmers full confidence in the quality of their code changes, improving risk management.

More of the development lifecycle Development tasks can be driven from Eclipse and away from the mainframe. This delivers real efficiency gains and improved cost efficiencies.

Those with an IT Backlog challenge will welcome the 25 percent development efficiency improvement the opportunity to resolve stagnant application maintenance work and achieve a 40 percent cost reduction.

Enabling more developers to cross-train and be more productive in the shortest possible time can underpin a scalable, repeatable and comprehensive IT compliance programme and help those with skills and outsourcing challenges to reduce the impact of any skills knowledge depletion.

In ConclusionIf IT is going to help organisations meet evolving business objectives, modernising mainframe application development must be ‘front of house.’ What is needed is a renewed development process that provides core business functions at the lowest operational cost without associ-ated risk. This would include improved code quality, greater flexibility in the mainframe development process and better cross-group integration across development.

The result would efficiency improvements that equate to—among other things—distinctive increases in development productivity. This more open environment would then enable lower-cost training of new talent and unifying development across COBOL, JAVA and .NET development communities.

Enterprise Developer tackles these major IT challenges by bringing an unparalleled level of productivity, flexibility and collaboration to the mainframe development process. This is industry-leading tooling that unifies development approaches and provides a totally flexible environ-ment with unrivalled mainframe compatibility. The highly-configurable development tools built in to Enterprise Developer—and the flexibility within the development process itself—enables customers to enjoy a swift return on investment, while remaining competitive and sustaining business growth.

Application Development Efficiency: Find Out MoreMainframe owners looking to improve operational efficiency in every aspect of their mainframe application delivery will benefit from reviewing our current mainframe solution8 or by downloading the three whitepa-pers below:

1. Towards the Modern Mainframe: renewing mainframe delivery processes—www.microfocus.com/downloads/towards-the-modern-mainframe-209932.aspx

2. Move up to Enterprise Developer: benefits for MFEEE users—www.microfocus.com/downloads/move-up-to-enterprise-develope-209934.aspx

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6 www.microfocus.com/resources/outsourcing.aspx7 www.microfocus.com/resources/skills.aspx8 www.microfocus.com/solutions/mainframesolution/

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3. Top 5 reasons to move up to Enterprise Developer for z Systems—www.microfocus.com/downloads/top-5-reasons-to-move-up-to-en-211957.aspx

DevOps: Find Out MoreWhere the requirement revolves around DevOps, IT leaders looking to embrace increased collaboration and unification are putting efficiency at the heart of their business strategy. Using modern technology, they can optimise every aspect of mainframe application delivery, drive down costs, remove specific bottlenecks and accelerate delivery velocity.

For a more detailed walkthrough of how, specifically, our technology can help your organisation achieve DevOps flexibility in the mainframe envi-ronment, then download our specialist whitepaper, Real World DevOps

for mainframe enterprises, from www.microfocus.com/campaigns/devops/wwdgnweb18925/index.aspx, or visit the dedicated Enter-prise Developer page at: www.microfocus.com/products/enter-prise/enterprise-developer.aspx

About Micro Focus

Since 1976, Micro Focus has helped more than 20,000 custom-ers unlock the value of their business logic by creating enabling solutions that bridge the gap from well-established technologies to modern functionality. The two portfolios work to a single, clear vision—to deliver innovative products supported by exceptional cus-tomer service. www.microfocus.com

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