Annecy, France and Peterborough NH, USA – 30 April 2020 – ARCAD Software, international leader in DevOps and Modernization solutions, today announced new advanced functionality to automate the creation, execution and management of Unit Tests on IBM i.

ARCAD iUnit was originally launched in 2018 to complement ARCAD’s functional test automation solution ARCAD Verifier.  ARCAD iUnit allows procedures, functions and service programs on IBM i to be tested individually, defining test “success” or “failure” in terms of assertions on resulting parameter values.

Parameter Discovery

Today’s release of ARCAD iUnit takes automation to a whole new level, including a discovery engine to automatically locate entry and output parameters based on ARCAD’s proven parsing technology for IBM i.  It is now possible to generate a unit test in just a few clicks from RDi.

Philippe Magne, ARCAD CEO highlighted the importance of unit testing in software development today: “Unit testing techniques are used first by developers during the coding process and then again as part of a test suite to regression test or smoke test an application as further modifications are made. They not only improve the reliability of code in the long term, but they encourage clarity and simplicity in code design. Consistent use of unit testing reduces the mean time to repair and technical debt overall”.

Integration with JUnit, Git and Jenkins

The new ARCAD iUnit integrates with JUnit, leveraging the same assertion methodology and allowing development teams to standardize on a single unit testing tool across all their platforms, including IBM i.

“Some IBM i practitioners underestimate the value of unit testing due to the development effort involved.  That is why it was so important for us to aim for the highest possible level of automation in the creation and launch of unit tests.  We built ARCAD iUnit to integrate in any standard DevOps stack, so that IBM i unit tests can be launched from Jenkins and stored in Git”, added Magne.

Multiple language support & complex parameters

ARCAD iUnit can be used to test any native languages on IBM i, such as RPG, CL, COBOL, C, etc.  The solution is also able to manage array parameters and complex data structures.

Test performance and code coverage

ARCAD iUnit also monitors test performance and keeps a perpetual history of tests. Unit tests can be exported and re-used in other environments and on other machines. With built-in code coverage, developers see what % of code has been executed by a test or test suite, so they can easily add more tests or more results to improve their coverage. The solution integrates with any SCM and test repositories can be created/initialized from an application version in a single click.

Shift-Left and ROI

“Developer-side techniques are a vital element of DevOps, which is why we developed ARCAD CodeChecker for static code quality checking, and now ARCAD iUnit to isolate defects as early as possible in the development process when they cost the least. With ARCAD iUnit any developer can execute a unit test in a single click from RDi, for every code change. This means that any offending code lines are detected instantly and they can be fixed before they leave the hands of the developer”, explained Magne.

“The software engineering institute (SEI) estimates that the cost of quality is running at $1,000 per defect when discovered in the testing phase of a project. Now with ARCAD iUnit our clients can prove a huge ROI as they discover defects early in the unit testing phase where the cost averages $100 to fix”.

Learn More – ARCAD iUnit Datasheet

About ARCAD Software

Celebrating 28 years serving the IBM i community, ARCAD Software combines DevOps and Modernization in an integrated, in-house developed product range, distributed by IBM worldwide.

With ARCAD solutions:

  • Automate a CI/CT/CD pipeline on IBM i with application analysis, build, test, and deploy
  • Share Git, Jenkins and Jira across all platforms IBM i, Linux, UNIX, Windows, z/OS
  • Transform RPG or Synon applications to modern Free Form RPG and SQL
  • Modernize green-screens and generate Webservices
  • Discover and Anonymize personal data
  • Synchronize Deployment of all your code AND data, on-premise or cloud

Press Contact:  Olenka Van Schendel, WW Marketing Director