Why COBOL Developers Prefer Writing Tests in Java - Szymon Wałachowski, Bartosz Filipek

What happens when 40 years of custom decisions stack so high that even the standard testing tools from your own vendor stop working? With Bartosz Filipek and Szymon Wałachowski I talk about exactly that situation: a mainframe environment so deep in its own customization that the only way forward was to build one final bridge to the outside world. We dig into how they created a Java-based unit testing tool for COBOL developers, and what surprised me most is that COBOL programmers find it easier to write assertions in Java than in their own first language. We also get into code coverage, integration with tools like SonarQube and X-ray, and the long road of getting something as basic as a service account approved.