The goal of this article is to discuss how improving the automated testing aspects of a continuous delivery project led to dramatic improvements in quality and delivered real business value to a leading bank in Melbourne Australia.

It will cover how the automated testing was integrated into the continuous delivery process to support Scrum, to empower testers and to shorten testing cycles.

Early in 2009, Shine Technologies performed a conversion of the COBOL source code used in FlyBuys systems to replace the use of the MicroFocus compiler with the Fujitsu COBOL compiler and related runtime libraries.

Read on for a high level overview of the activities involved in this project, and how it ultimately turned out.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a widely used - and misused - phrase in IT, having evolved to have different meanings to different people.

For some it is no more than a re-branding of an architectural approach used for decades on large scale enterprise applications. Examples include CORBA Services in the 1990s, RMI from Java 1.1 onwards and DCOM.

For others, SOA is a new nirvana; a place where where corporate services are exposed via Web Services to be discovered and consumed by a multitude of clients (using any technology), the end-result being rich and productive new systems built from standard building blocks. To quote Wikipedia :

"SOAs build applications out of software services. Services are relatively large, intrinsically unassociated units of functionality, which have no calls to each other embedded in them."

Continuous Integration with CruiseControl is a standard part of the development process here at Shine Technologies. All new projects kick off with a new build server and a CruiseControl install that calls out to the standard Ant build files and jUnit tests. Continuous Integration is a well proven process that both gets a new project up and running quickly and provides long-term support and infrastructure - even for legacy Cobol systems.