DEVOPSdigest

CA BlazeMeter released a new JMeter plugin for mainframe testing.

The RTE plugin was developed as part of the organization’s strategy to offer open-source based solutions for continuous testing.

Supporting IBM mainframe protocols TN5250 and TN3270, the JMeter RTE plugin simulates a mainframe terminal sending actions and keystrokes to the mainframe server. By using the plugin, developers and testers can simulate filling forms or calling processes, specify the position of fields on the screen and the text to set on them, and simulate the keyboard attention keys.

Finally, developers can easily utilize open source technology to run both load and functional performance tests on mainframe servers. Instead of having to use complex legacy tools or waiting for engineers in Centers of Excellence, this new BlazeMeter-developed plugin enables all developers to easily run continuous performance tests, automatically and on-demand. JMeter can also be integrated with Continuous Integration tools like Jenkins, TeamCity, Bamboo, etc.. This shift left to agile testing and development makes testing easy and frees up development resources.

“Mainframe, which has lived in the Waterfall development methodology for over 60 years, needs to transition to agile to enable more frequent releases without compromising on performance and quality to support modern application and delivery methodologies. This cannot be achieved without the right tools to enable the agile teams to own full responsibility for their applications. By contributing the JMeter RTE Plugin to the OpenSource community - BlazeMeter enables agile teams to write their functional and performance scenarios to ensure the next feature or hotfix will comply with the quality and performance required,” says Refael Botbol Weiss, Software Engineering Director at BlazeMeter.