March 2025
To: Brightside/Test4z Customers
From: Broadcom's Test4z Product Team
Subject: General Availability Announcement for Test4z 1.2
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 1.2 is now available.
Unit testing is the foundation of the quality process – get it right and quality code will be the result; 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 (for example, 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.
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.
New Test4z 1.2 features and enhancements include:
This enhancement delivers performance improvements and various enhancements to Test4z. These improvements can enable your unit tests to run faster, offer greater flexibility with your testing environment, and provide better diagnostic information for troubleshooting problems.
Enhanced Runtime Environment:
- Significant performance improvements for mocked indexed files, record and replay processing, spies, and more. Some internal testing showed a 28x improvement in processing large mocked files and replaying of recorded data.
- Added support for stubbing out middleware (CICS, Db2, Db2/CAF, IMS, and IMS/AIB) using _StubProgram API to enable a user routine to run instead of the framework or real middleware
- Allow calls to the real system under test program while within a stubbed program of the same name. For example, the user might want to stub Prog1, change some input data, and call the real Prog1 with the changed data to force an alternate path.
- Added support for Record and Replay for VSAM/KSDS alternate index
- Improved Test Harness mismatch error messages and processing to enable the user to understand and correct issues with the test
- New EXTERNAL variable option to automatically record external variables on each program-to-program call and automatic argument matching
- Detect and inform user about missing external variables from test cases
- ARGLENGTHS is now exported into ZLDETAIL
- Memory usage, API usage, and command interception statistics added to ZLRESULT for unit tests to provide additional information to the user
- Improved error and informational messages, Reason and Action text added to ZLMSG for important messages to help the user understand and correct the problem
- Detect calls to LE CEE3ABD and CEE3AB2 and divert to Test4z asserts during unit testing to allow the unit test to continue processing
- Enhanced SCRT reporting to ensure accurate and comprehensive data collection on Test4z usage
Enhanced CLI Function and Options:
- New t4z api-help command to access COBOL API documentation from the CLI to enable the user to access the API documentation from within their work environment
- New t4z sample-code command to enable the upgrading of samples with an option to backup the existing samples
- Improved project configuration validation to ensure correct identification of test files, programs under test, and Db2/CICS components, preventing failures due to outdated or incorrect configurations
- New compatibility check for VS Code extension, CLI, and runtime versions to ensure compatible levels of dependent code
- Improved line coverage (LCOV) function in CLI to assist in finding untested system under test code
Improved Samples, VS Code Extension, and Documentation:
- New and updated sample unit test programs and system under test programs to demonstrate different testing scenarios. New sample unit test programs include: ZTTKSZOO (KSDS alternate index validation), ZTTSPYPR (program spies and program stubs to manipulate incoming parameters)
- VS Code extension (Unit Test for Mainframe) is available in VS Code Marketplace and VSX to enable easy installation of the extension
- New and improved diagnostic messages, compatibility matrix for VS Code Extension, CLI, and Runtime, and other documentation improvements to improve product resources for users
We also encourage you to visit the Test4z product information page.
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 in the TechDocs documentation. 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 petr.vacula@broadcom.com. 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.
#Brightside