The goal of the project is to enable isolated unit testing of individual paragraphs in Cobol programs in a standalone environment with no connection to a zOS system.

Please see the wiki for more information.

The unit test precompiler copies the program under test and inserts test code into the WORKING-STORAGE SECTION and PROCEDURE DIVISION. You can then run the copy of the program, which executes the isolated unit test cases without running the program from start to finish.

           TESTSUITE 'CONVERT COMMA-DELIMITED FILE TO FIXED FORMAT' 

      *****************************************************************
      * COBOL COMMENTS ARE IGNORED SO YOU CAN DO THIS SORT OF THING IF
      * YOU PLEASE.
      *****************************************************************  

           BEFORE-EACH
               MOVE FOO TO BAR
               MOVE ZERO TO WS-COUNT
           END-BEFORE

           AFTER-EACH
               INITIALIZE WS-RESULTS-TABLE
           END-AFTER

           TESTCASE 'IT CONVERTS TEXT FIELD 1 TO UPPER CASE' 
               MOVE 'something' TO TEXT-VALUE-1
               PERFORM 2100-CONVERT-TEXT-FIELD-1
               EXPECT TEXT-OUT-1 TO BE 'SOMETHING'

           TESTCASE 'IT HANDLES FILE NOT FOUND GRACEFULLY'
               MOCK
                   FILE INPUT-FILE 
                   ON OPEN STATUS FILE-NOT-FOUND
               END-MOCK    
               PERFORM 0100-OPEN-INPUT
               EXPECT WS-INPUT-FILE-STATUS TO BE '35'
               EXPECT WS-FRIENDLY-MESSAGE TO BE 'SORRY, COULDN''T FIND INPUT-FILE'

The precompiler recognizes certain keywords and substitutes test code, so that you need not code a lot of boilerplate code manually. Please see the wiki for syntax details.

TESTSUITE - Provides a description for a series of test cases. The description is echoed in the output from the test run.

MOCK - declares a mock. Current version has support for mocking EXEC CICS commands and rudimentary support for mocking batch file I/O. This feature is currently under active development.

BEFORE-EACH, AFTER-EACH - the precompiler copies these statements into paragraphs that are performed at the start and end of each test case.

TESTCASE - identifies a test case. The description is echoed in the output of the test run.

EXPECT - asserts an expected result. Current version supports PIC X, numeric, and 88-level compares.

VERIFY - verifies that a mock was accessed the expected number of times.

The precompiler ignores Cobol-style comment lines.

Compile the program SAMPLE, located at src/main/cobol/SAMPLE.CBL

./compile SAMPLE

Run the unit tests for SAMPLE. Configuration file is src/test/resources/SAMPLEC and unit tests are in src/test/cobol/unit-tests/SAMPLET.

./run-ut SAMPLEC SAMPLE SAMPLET

Run all the provided examples.

./run-examples

The sample programs are:

• CALLDEMO - demonstration of testing a called subprogram.
• CICSDEMO - demonstration of testing a CICS program.
• CONVERT - convert a CSV file into a fixed-format file.
• FILEDEMO - demonstration of batch file mocks.
• FIZZBUZZ - the classic FizzBuzz exercise.
• INVDATE - calculate the date of the last day of the month.
• PARADEMO - demonstration of mocking paragraphs.
• SAMPLE - minimal unit test code for a "Hello, World!" program.
• SUBPROG - demonstration of testing a called subprogram.

The unit test framework comprises:

• ZUTZCPC - the precompiler that inserts test code into a copy of the program under test.
• ZUTZCPD - PROCEDURE DIVISION copybook containing common test code.
• ZUTZCWS - WORKING-STORAGE SECTION copybook containing common test code.

We want the unit test framework to be usable on zOS, *nix, and Windows systems. Most objects on zOS systems are limited to 8-character names, and IBM product names follow a certain pattern. We followed the same pattern in an informal way. Referring to this document, we did not find an existing product with the prefix ZUT. So, the names of the components in the unit testing framework mean:

• ZUT - zOS Unit Test
• ZC - zOS Cobol
• PC - precompiler
• PD - PROCEDURE DIVISION
• WS - WORKING-STORAGE