<p>Parasoft announced that its Jolt-award winning Service Virtualization offering, Parasoft Virtualize, now provides advanced support for creating simulated test environments for mainframesreducing the cost and complexity of evolving open systems.</p><p>Developing and testing applications that leverage a mainframe environment can be a complex, costly, and time-consuming endeavor due to factors such as complexity of access, the cost of MIPS consumption, and the operational cost and delays involved in making changes to mainframe components. These challenges are compounded in Agile and iterative development environments. By providing ubiquitous access to simulated test environments, Parasoft's Service Virtualization significantly reduces the costs and constraints traditionally associated with developing or testing open systems that communicate with (or leverage) mainframe assets.</p><p>Parasoft's Service Virtualization enables organizations to simulate the application under test's interactions with subsystems ranging from DB2 databases, to CICS regions, to IMS. This communication may occur over protocols such as MQ, HTTP, TCP/IP, and JDBC, and it may involve payloads such as Copybook, XML, fixed-length or other custom message format. This not only promotes faster, more complete testing, but also minimizes disruption to high-value mainframe resources that could be better utilized for runtime or later-stage testing and validation.</p><p>"There are obviously many benefits associated with simulating interactions involving the mainframe," explained Mark Lambert, VP of Global Services at Parasoft. "One of the most pressing right now is addressing the conflicting business and operational requirements between mainframe teams and more agile or iterative development approaches. Service Virtualization alleviates that tension. It minimizes disruption to high-value mainframe resources and at the same time enables the development and QA teams working with open systems to have full access to (and control over) the test environmentanytime, anywhere."</p><p><a href="http://www.fortmilltimes.com/2013/04/23/2638947/parasoft-service-virtualization.html">Keep reading...</a></p>