Compuware Topaz™ Upgrade Empowers Millennial Development & QA Teams to Understand and Troubleshoot

DETROIT - April 1, 2015 - PRLog -- DETROIT—April 1, 2015—Compuware Corporation, the world’s leading mainframe-dedicated software company, today released a significant upgrade to Topaz, its innovative solution for empowering IT organizations to continue making the most of IBM z Systems environments as experienced mainframers retire and a new generation of developers, data architects and QA professionals take their place.

Topaz’s new Program Analysis intelligently analyzes mainframe programs and presents the results of that analysis in a visually intuitive manner. This visual analysis empowers both mainframe-inexperienced and mainframe-experienced IT professionals to:

·         Readily and accurately understand COBOL and PL/l application logic and logical dependencies, even for applications with which they are not familiar and/or which are not well-documented

·         Quickly identify problems such as undefined fields, range violations and dead code—then correct them before compiling

·         Easily assess program attributes such as size, complexity, number of files and tables, etc.

·         Easily assess procedure-level metrics such as number of performs, conditionals, GOTO statements, and McCabe complexity metrics

·         Better collaborate across development and operations teams to find and fix code issues

"Application development on the mainframe continues to be challenging, and Compuware is taking a proactive approach to address these challenges," said Ben Toscano, Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Group, Physicians Mutual.

Topaz’s productivity-enhancing program visualization capabilities are in addition to the data visualization capabilities (http://www.compuware.com/assets/web-assets/pdf/Topaz-Fina...) provided in the initial release of Topaz. Combined, this data and program visualization empowers IT professionals of all skill levels to better understand and work with all types of applications—regardless of their familiarity with any underlying data formats, computing platforms or programming languages.

Topaz provides its rich code visualization, data visualization and collaboration capabilities within the familiar look-and-feel of the Eclipse IDE.

“Our enterprise applications are becoming more complex and hybridized. At the same time, veteran mainframe developers are retiring leaving the care of these applications in the hands of developers who are unfamiliar with the mainframe,” said April Blackwell, Manager, Information Technology, Mississippi Farm Bureau Casualty Insurance Company. “Given this landscape, it’s essential that mainframe-inexperienced IT pros have access to intuitive and easy-to-use tools to help them leverage our high-value applications.”

Compuware’s Agile Mainframe Commitment

By delivering such a substantial upgrade of Topaz just 13 weeks after its original roll-out in January, Compuware is fulfilling its promise to adopt an Agile development model whereby it will release new capabilities on a quarterly release cycle. This continuous stream of mainframe innovation is in stark contrast to other mainframe ISVs, which typically operate under an annual release cycle or longer.

This unique business agility enables Compuware to tightly align its deliverables with customers’ evolving needs—which in turn enables its customers to more aggressively evolve their mainframe environments, so they can better keep pace with the relentlessly escalating demands of their businesses.

“IBM z Systems support the core systems of record for many of today’s enterprises. Leveraging those investments to improve customer engagement and enhance employee effectiveness is critical for such organizations as they compete in a mobile-first digital world,” said Jason Bloomberg, President at agile digital transformation analyst firm Intellyx. “The new release of Topaz demonstrates that Compuware is fully committed to and fully capable of helping organizations meet this critical challenge by mainframe-enabling a new generation of developers and QA engineers.”

“To more adaptively apply their mainframe hardware, software and data to their business challenges, companies need mainframe solution vendors that are similarly adaptive,” said Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley. “Compuware is leading the way in bringing Agile development—and thereby business agility—to the mainframe for the benefit of customers that need to adapt more quickly in today’s fast-moving markets.”

Additional Resources

Visit compuware.com/topaz to watch a short video on Topaz Program Analysis and access product information and other resources.

Compuware Corporation

Compuware empowers the world’s largest companies to excel in the digital economy by fully leveraging their high-value mainframe intellectual property.  We do this by delivering highly innovative mainframe application development and performance optimization solutions that uniquely enable IT to drive business value. Learn more at compuware.com (http://www.compuware.com/)