Improving the mainframe developers’ experience depends upon more than tools
Imagine the stereotypical mainframe department: a handful of grizzled veterans, tapping away at green screens, oblivious to the modern digital world teeming around them.
This fantastical scenario has become less of a reality in modern mainframe organizations than it has ever been. There are simply too many forces at play.
Modern digital priorities are driving cloud native computing practices across the IT landscape, and the mainframe is a strategic part of this new reality.
Meanwhile, the proverbial grizzled veterans are retiring (or worse), driving a generational change in what constitutes the typical mainframe professional.
The mainframe itself faces its own transformation, as modernization initiatives drive both new and updated software on the mainframe as well as new uses for mainframe applications and data within the cloud native landscape.
All these forces of change require both new and senior mainframe developers to step up to the plate – and for their organizations to sharpen their focus on improving the mainframe developer experience, or DevX.
What is the Modern Mainframe DevX?
The mainframe DevX has been an integral part of the distributed computing DevX since web sites first accessed mainframe data in the mid-1990s, starting with online banking but soon expanding into web access to numerous types of mainframe applications.
Nevertheless, in spite of ongoing mainstreaming of the mainframe into modern web – and now cloud – development tooling for the mainframe has largely been separate from the more modern tools available to the distributed computing professional.
The modern mainframe DevX changes this equation. The mainframe DevX is no longer a tool or even a set of tools. It’s an approach to achieving the goals of the software development effort by following modern practices as well as tools across the IT landscape.
For example, the DevX from BMC consists of a collection of tools and associated practices and processes that help developers connect to VS Code, Git, and other modern tooling, along with an all-inclusive dashboard for automated access to the capabilities the mainframe developer requires.
Automation, in fact, plays an important role in the modern mainframe DevX. Within the distributed computing world, automation is an essential enabler of DevOps.
Modern mainframe development tools like those from BMC now fully support DevOps practices, bringing an ‘open borders’ approach to mainframe DevX that recognizes that from the perspective of the DevX, the mainframe is but one platform among many.
DevOps: The Key to Improving the Mainframe Developer Experience
Regardless of the changes impacting the mainframe development team, the practice of DevOps has become the unifying principle that improves their day-to-day experience within the context of their organizations’ enterprise application development efforts.
DevOps is a mindset, a culture, and a set of technical practices that foster better communication and collaboration across the software lifecycle. Automation makes DevOps a practical reality, but it’s more a change in human perception and behavior than the set of tools that drive the automation, aka the DevOps toolchain.
Both the mainframe veterans as well as the newer generation of mainframe professionals can now work with a coordinated set of modern tools that treat the mainframe as one platform among many. This new mindset is at the heart of mainframe DevOps, as it improves the mainframe DevX across all constituencies.
Beyond the Tools: Mainframe DevOps as a Mindset
Tools-based automation is essential for successful DevOps, but DevOps is more of a mindset than any particular set of technologies.
In fact, if an organization mistakenly believes that DevOps is all about the toolchain, they will likely end up with a mishmash of poorly integrated tools that do little to accelerate the development lifecycle or improve the experience of developers – mainframe or otherwise.
To move past these limitations, DevOps must progress past the mishmash phase to embrace platform engineering to implement an integrated development platform that supports all developers in the organization, including mainframe developers.
Platform engineering seeks to balance two conflicting priorities: self-service capabilities and automated continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) across the software lifecycle.
Self-service is important for two reasons. First, it shifts the responsibility for configuring the various tools in the DevOps toolchain to the people who are responsible for using them. Second, it gives those people the ability to choose which tools they want to use and how they want to deploy them.
Self-service is essential for improving the mainframe DevX, as it empowers these professionals to work the way they want to work, using the tools best suited to the challenges they face.
The Intellyx Take
Platform engineering – and by extension, DevOps – will always be a balancing act. On the one hand, DevOps engineers leverage best practices to deploy an integrated development platform that the entire team can use in a consistent way.
On the other hand, this platform also improves the mainframe DevX by giving developers the ability to choose the tools they wish to use, within the context of the best practices the DevOps team have built into the platform.
Balancing these two conflicting priorities requires a ‘paving the roads’ approach to best practices: the integrated development platform makes it easy to accomplish tasks by following the organization’s best practices approach, while allowing for the possibility that developers might go ‘off road’ if they feel it’s important to diverge from this established standard.
The mainframe DevX hangs in the balance. The only way to fully include mainframe development into an organization’s DevOps mindset is to provide such developers with the paved road as well as the freedom and trust to diverge from it if they feel it’s the right thing to do.
Copyright © Intellyx LLC. BMC is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. No AI was used in the creation of this article. Image credit: Craiyon (AI).
