CA/EZTEST

CA/EZTEST was a CICS interactive test/debug software package distributed by Computer Associates and originally called EZTEST/CICS, produced by Capex Corporation of Phoenix, Arizona with assistance from Ken Dakin from England. The product provided Source level test and debugging features for programs written in COBOL, PL/1 and Assembler languages to complement their own existing COBOL optimizer product.

Competition

CA/EZTEST initially competed with two rival products:-
* "Intertest" originally from On-line software international, based in the US and
* OLIVER (CICS interactive test/debug) from Advanced Programming Techniques in the UK

and, much later, in the early 1990's
* Xpeditor from Compuware Corporation who in 1994 acquired the OLIVER product.

eventually CA, Inc. purchased Intertest from On-line software , renamed it CA-INTERTEST and stopped selling CA/EZTEST.

Early Critical role

Between them, these three products provided much needed third party system software support for IBM's "flagship" teleprocessing product CICS which incredibly survived for more than 20 years as a strategic product without any memory protection of its own. A single "rogue" application program (frequently by a buffer overflow) could accidentally overwrite data almost anywhere in the address space causing "down-time" for the entire teleprocessing system possibly supporting thousands of remote terminals. This was despite the fact that much of the worlds banking and other commerce relied heavily on CICS for secure transaction processing between 1970 and early 1990's.The difficulty in deciding which application program caused the problem was often insurmountable and frequently the System would be re-started without spending many hours investigated very large (and initially unformatted) "Core dump"s requiring expert System programming support & knowledge.

Early integrated testing environment

Additionally, the product (and its competitors) provided an integrated testing environment which was not provided by IBM for early versions of CICS and which was only partially satisfied with their later embedded testing tool - "Execution Diagnostic facility" (EDF) which only helped newer "Command level" programmers and provided no protection.

Operating Systems supported

* IBM MVS
* IBM XA
* IBM VSE (except Xpediter)

External links

* [http://www.ibm.com/cics IBM CICS official website]
* [http://www.compuware.com/products/xpediter/default.htm Xpediter - Interactive mainframe analysis and debugging]
* [http://www3.ca.com/solutions/ProductFamily.aspx?ID=1320 CA Inc. - product description for CA-Intertest]