Louisa Denly

product manager, degree apprentice graduate, open source advocate, bookworm, flautist, heavy-metal fan | views are my own

  • What is Application Integration Testing?

    When I first learned about application integration, I was working in a role which mixed many pieces of technology together to create complex business processes. For example, layering MQ, WebSphere and Docker containers with different hosting environments such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or the mainframe. Getting these technologies to work together can be complicated and require extensive experience as an enterprise architect. Application integration allows software to be created as a unique and bespoke set of applications that knit together to form critical business processes.

    One of the strengths of the mainframe is its ability to handle large volumes of user interactions concurrently, but the trade-off is often one of complexity. Imagine a banking application: a system would have to handle an ATM request, mobile banking log-in, point terminal payment, and business transactions all happening simultaneously. If we look at application integration from a perspective of building blocks, the ability to upgrade or change the entire stack is not trivial, as there are many interconnected moving parts.

    Despite this, individual components such as a database or the mobile application still need to be modified independently, for example to combat security vulnerabilities or to upgrade versions. This requires careful consideration of how these applications are integrated. After identifying what needs changing, the next step is to understand how to test that the change was successful. There are many steps to this: the first is unit testing, which is the ability to test individual components have been effectively changed and work independently. Often overlooked however is application integration testing, and it a difficult next step to get right. Secondly, application integration testing ensures that individual components interact with each other in a desirable way: for example, testing the relationship between the database and the middleware and how the data travels successfully between them.

    Automation of this stage of testing is critical because there typically are so many configurations, routes, and scenarios to consider. And once fixed, batching updates, and testing them together can be problematic: if a problem is found and it’s difficult to find which change caused it.

    Here are three tips for you to think about when performing application integration testing:

    1. Thorough Test Case Coverage:

    Comprehensive test case coverage is crucial for uncovering potential issues in the integration of individual components. Ensure that your test cases are comprehensive and cover not only normal usage, but also edge cases and error conditions. This helps identify potential weaknesses in the system’s integration and ensures that it can handle different situations gracefully.

    2. Automate Testing Where Possible:

    Automation plays a significant role in speeding up the integration testing process and increasing its reliability. Use automation tools to execute repetitive and complex test scenarios, allowing for more frequent testing and quicker feedback. Automated tests also help ensure consistency in testing procedures and reduce the risk of human error.

    3. Early and Incremental Testing:

    Start integration testing early in the development process and perform it incrementally as different components become available. Early testing helps identify integration issues at the initial stages, making it easier to address them. Incremental testing allows you to focus on specific modules or functionalities as they are completed, preventing the accumulation of complex issues towards the end of the development cycle.

    This can all seem pretty daunting, but Galasa could be your first step to understanding how to build test cases that cover multiple applications and can even be extended to cover proprietary applications with the use of managers. Galasa is an integration test framework that makes it easy to create and run tests using all types of applications. The framework has managers, that allow different technologies to be tested in one seamless test, for example a web interface with CICS or IMS middleware and a database backend, that can all be tested as one seamless test. Alternatively, automating existing JCL tests with the ultimate aim to increase the reliability of tricky, integrated applications, wherever they sit on the distributed architecture. Galasa is already within the Open Mainframe Project, and can allow developers to automate manual tasks that are error prone and time consuming.

    To get started with Galasa, and maybe get involved with the active developer community, go to https://galasa.dev or https://www.github.com/galasa-dev. Reach out to the team and ask how they could help you get up and running, go to the Open Mainframe Project Slack and search for #galasa-users to get help on your next steps to application integration testing.

  • First Six Months as TSC Chair for Galasa

    It’s coming to the end of 2023, and it has been a whirlwind year. I joined the Galasa team back in January to look at how we can gain adoption by the Linux Foundation and more specifically, the Open Mainframe Project (part of the LF) to gain better governance and, most importantly, find the right home for Galasa. Through research and some team conversations, we felt the Open Mainframe Project was the right place, as their mission is to enhance the quality, reliability andavailability of Mainframe systems, and the adoption of modern development methodologies, which Galasa supports. The process to gaining adoption by the Open Mainframe Project was to gain a sponsor from the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), and present at one of their monthly meetings to gain approval from the voting members. With Joe Bostian as our sponsor, in April, Will Yates and I presented to the committee and got an overwhelming vote of approval – we had finally made the crucial step towards adoption! 

    The next step was to organise the Technical Steering Committee (TSC). We had our first meeting in June in the open and as we hadn’t been fully announced, it took a little bit of time for us to get up and running. I was elected as Chairperson and luckily, we have a great team – Mike presented the technical roadmap that had been created before being adopted, and we have Michelle, Dom, Venkat, and Petr to represent other organisations interested in steering the project in the right way; it felt like we were finding our feet. Having an open source project is like starting with a blank page and thinking,how do we start to gain attention and traction so that people know we exist? How do we make it as easy as possible for people to join us? 

    When we announced Galasa back in September (here), I was full of excitement. We gained sessions at the Open Mainframe Summit, part of the IBM TechXchange conference. I got the opportunity to present on the Keynote and a Galasa 101 talk as part of the agenda which was my first time attending a conference to speak, so I gained a lot of new experiences in a short space of time. By September, we had gotten into the flow of running TSC meetings in public, and we created the project structure: the iteration planning (fortnightly), scrum meetings (thrice weekly), and retrospectives (every 6 weeks) – for the calendar click here. For me, this felt like the opportunity to start thinking longer term, I had the opportunity to think less about how we fight the immediate fires of getting ready, and more about how we drive towards the future. 

    October and November seemed to pass by incredibly quickly, as we were moving the Galasa infrastructure, building more enhancements for the CLI capability, and helping publicise through videos, blogs, and conferences such as GSE UK. Watching Michelle and Jade present in person at GSE UK was phenomenal, because it felt like the open source project was gaining traction. Although they had done those presentations before, I was able to sit and watch the audience reaction, which made it even more real. Also, now we had been fully launched, it was time to submit the Galasa project to the DevOps Dozen Awards and plan for 2024. 

    Building up to the year full of achievements, Will and the team have put in years of effort, architecture, development, and thought into getting Galasa into the brilliant place where the project can now live under the right governance and home with the OMP. For now, there are three things we want to accomplish: gaining new contributors; attracting and looking after users; and building a version 1. This will allow us to be more sustainable as a project and continue to help automate testing and make developing on the mainframe a better experience for those that do it every day. 

    Come and join us! Our calendar is here, we meet on the #galasa-dev slack and you’re always welcome to download the project and have a go for yourself. Follow Mike for a step-by-step guide – link is here. 

  • Skills for Life Campaign Advert

    It all started in July 2023, when I sent off a video of myself speaking for 30 seconds and some information about my apprenticeship, company, and background. In September, I was contacted by the casting agency working on behalf of the Department for Education to be part of a filming shoot in mid-October. I was understandably really excited, what could this mean – they gave me an idea that it could be billboards, adverts, posters, and banners, but I didn’t know which part of that I’d be involved in.

    They sent me all the information running up to the event where I’d be off to shoot for a TV advert in Manchester in mid-October 2023. I took the 5 hour train up to Manchester one Wednesday afternoon, and stayed in a hotel overnight anxiously awaiting the call sheet they would send me later. The taxi call was 6am, and I went down to find 3 other apprentices and an actress waiting for the same mini-bus, and we were off to the set outside Manchester. We arrived at some trucks stationed outside in the car park of an old school being used as the set and got some breakfast from the truck outside. The truck had been converted into a canteen area, I had never seen that before, felt like I was on the set of something really exciting. I got taken to wardrobe to show them which clothes I was wearing and had to get changed into some new clothing as I was told the director didn’t agree with skinny jeans. The shoot was fascinating – so completely different to my life at IBM – watching the camera, lighting, and staging crew asking extras to walk up and down stairs multiple times took ages but was really interesting to see how this was all put together. I was featured in the classroom scene, along with Harrison and Bolu, and I was seated next to the main actress, and my job was to greet her as she sat down.

    I felt really excited coming out of the shoot, not knowing how it was going to be edited together and whether I was going to be part of the edit. As part of this, I was then asked lots of information from the PR company about my experience as an apprentice and my story. They absolutely loved that I had completed two apprenticeships at various stages of my career and it really gave me a boost to be recognised for the achievements that I’d made. Consequently, they’ve featured me in multiple places: CareerMag, the local radio lunchtime news, and 4 international news outlets.

  • GSE UK 2023

    In November, I spent time at the GSE UK conference in Whittlebury Hall, near Silverstone in the UK. It was my second conference, so I was full of anticipation and unsure what I was going into. My first thought was – how on earth am I going to navigate the mammoth agenda with an exceptional amount of content, and the second – are there going to be people I know?

    I spent time before the conference going through the agenda and selecting one or two sessions for each slot to make sure that I had a few things lined up to go to. On the Monday, they had put on a half-day set of sessions that were particularly interesting, I went to a session on Cyber Resiliency specifically looking at how customers can use a Cyber Vault to be particularly resilient against potential cyber-attacks. The vendor area with stands wasn’t open until the following day, so I wanted to make sure that I had acclimatised. Many friends from the previous conference (IBM TechXchange) were there, including Steven, Emma, Joe, Tony, Shari. When I saw them socialising in the bar, it really helped me find my feet in terms of understanding how to navigate the conference and using the new app they had started using.

     

    As I had settled, the next three days were far more entertaining. I spent time wandering around the stand with a Lego Mainframe, the Plexi (which is a see-through Mainframe), the formula one race car that sat out the front, the InterSkill stand, and really just absorbing the atmosphere that came with GSE UK. I went to some sessions around an introduction to CICS – this was highlighting the next features in the latest release 6.1, this also signposted the rest of the sessions at the conference which Tony highlighted particularly well. Michelle did a fantastic session about Macro 4’s use of Galasa and it was brilliant to see her advertise the way that they had taken many of their old tests and converted them to Galasa tests. Additionally, Broadcom did a great pitch about DevOps on the Mainframe, and how to modernise from the perspective of making changes to systems. One session was around OpenTelemetry too, it was brilliant to see the way that open-source and parity of technology across the distributed and on premise platforms were merging and they were becoming far more synonymous with each other. There’s a lot of work to be done in this area, but it’s growing in excitement due to the amount of information that is flowing between disparate systems struggling to talk to each other.

    A particularly proud moment was seeing Jade Carino give her talk on Galasa (How to Test the Mainframe Without Knowing the Mainframe). It was the first time that she’d given the talk to an audience, and it was brilliant to see her move around the room, give her demos smoothly and even if something went wrong, she was able to pick herself back up and figure out how to move on. She had a room full of interested users and hopefully we have one or two that went home to see if they could try it. It was a brilliant moment to see her present and I’m really proud of how far she’s come.

     Thank you to GSE for a brilliant event, and I’m excited to be part of the virtual event in April 2024.

  • Open Mainframe Summit – TechXchange 2023

    The Open Mainframe Summit, held on the 11th September, was an excellent showcase of the breadth and depth of the people, community, and technology that is key to the future of the Mainframe platform. The morning sessions included keynotes on topics such as mentorship, a welcoming note from John Mertic and Jason Gartner, Zowe, and the diverse community the Mainframe draws together. Plus, the excitement around announcing Galasa formally had started the day well – with a whole bunch of new stickers to hand out.

    The particular highlight for me, was hosting the diversity panel alongside Donna Hudi, Len Santalucia, and Sudharsana Srinivasan. I started meeting with people from the Open Mainframe Project earlier in the year, and over the last 9 months, I’ve felt nothing but warmth, kindness, and a sense of common language between those that are part of the OMP community. Therefore, the panel was designed to bring out the highlights of working around the Mainframe, such as the ability to walk up to a stranger and discuss VSAM datasets, CICS or SMF transactions and the attitudes towards how enabling different thinkers gives the ability for innovation and alternative solutions. This was really highlighted by Sudharsana, when she spoke about her experience developing advocacy programs within Mainframe. On the other hand, Donna gave a great response to focus on the narratives we write when meeting someone or approaching a new situation. She explained that those narratives can immediately put barriers causing us to feel defensive and unsure when meeting new people. However, if we notice the stories being written then we’re able to give ourselves the chance to rewrite that and form a different opinion. This was highlighted with Len, when he spoke about people judging him for not acting in the same way as his peers. His family history meant he was an ally for women in the workplace when that wasn’t commonplace. Personally, the most significant thing is that I felt like the anxiety and worry I had around hosting a panel in front of strangers went away when I was able to speak about my first year in Mainframe. I had several people come up to me afterwards to show me their support and that the OMP was the kind of place that brought a whole range of people together that all just wanted to create great software.  

    As my first conference, the experience was overwhelming with all the people and excitement – with the afternoon packed full of 20-minute sessions covering all the OMP themes such as modernisation, development experience, automated testing, and education. I was surrounded by a mix of people, from customers, users, contributors, and business sponsors that wanted to learn more. From the two rooms, I learnt more about Zowe, and as Tim Willging walked through the lessons learnt from the past five years, and what’s next for the project. I absolutely loved speaking about Galasa, the new integrated automated test project within the OMP. The audience was small, but well formed, with questions and follow-on conversation which meant it was worth the effort. People floated throughout the two rooms and because the sessions were shorter, the ability to learn and absorb more was seen by everyone. Although afterwards, I did feel exhausted.

    The Summit was a great experience to meet those I’d heard about online or met virtually. It felt like I’d been part of the community for years, people were so welcoming, and I really could walk up to them and talk about anything. I’m excited to be part of the OMP and continue to build the relationships with people that I’ve met and hope to continue to support those that feel like outsiders. We can all feel like we don’t fit in, but the community built already makes you feel like you’re immediately part of the club.