The growing need for digital transformation has driven organizations to aggressively transform themselves and adopt DevOps to enable accelerated application delivery, which is a key part of the transformation. While it’s great to see the adoption rate growing significantly for DevOps, testing remains a major bottleneck to a continuous software development lifecycle.

The recent survey results from Gitlab on DevSecOps confirm just that.

“Testing remains tough — for the third year in a row, a majority of survey-takers resoundingly pointed to testing as the area most likely to cause delays. The other bottlenecks include planning, code development, and code review, again reflecting what we’ve seen in our 2019 and 2020 surveys.”

In our continuous and sincere effort to address this issue, last year we announced the general availability of IBM Z® Virtual Test Platform V1.0, which fundamentally changed the game by providing testing capabilities that allow application integration, transaction and batch testing to be shifted earlier in the development cycle on a fully virtualized test platform.

For the first time, developers were able to test complete application integration before the code is even deployed to production while automating testing as part of their build process in a CI/CD pipeline. With this week’s V2.0 release, we have further strengthened the solution, incorporating key feedback from our clients by providing an html-based test results viewer and the ability to effectively version control your test case and results ensuring auditability and pipeline integration.

Further with ZVTP V2.0, we are taking a big stride forward in adding test automation and deep integration testing capabilities with IBM Distribution for Galasa. Based on the open-source project ‘Galasa’, the solution allows you to test applications at scale regardless of platform — including z/OS. Galasa enables deep integration testing across platforms and technologies within a DevOps pipeline. Galasa is designed to support repeatable, reliable, agile testing at scale across your enterprise.

IBM distribution for Galasa is not simply about providing the ability to write a test and run it in automation. It extends that to enable you to understand and manage your tests. This makes it easy to schedule the right tests to run at the right time and Galasa support is provided with VTP.

We will continue to strengthen our testing capabilities and you can look forward to some exciting and new capabilities coming up in our subsequent releases.

>> To learn more, visit the Z Virtual Test Platform product page.

>> For a technical perspective, read “Testing hybrid Z applications with VTP 2.0.”