Team Build — Small Tools that have Big Impact
A customer recently told me “I didn’t know that Team Build helps with non-Endevor based applications.” They thought that it was JUST a part of the Endevor modernization experience. Indeed Broadcom’s Team Build stands on its own and supports teams no matter where their z/OS applications are managed.
Take it from a conversation I had with Greg Spranger, a Broadcom Mainframe Expert who helped a major US financial institution with a large modernization project related to their (non-Endevor!) legacy SCM.
The team that Greg worked with had an ethos of “small tools with big impact.” For them, “small” signified uncomplicated in terms of install, configuration, and use, yet feature-rich overall. Team Build, particularly the components syncz and bldz, fits that ethos to a T.
This blog dives into what Team Build is, some of the common use cases, and details the big impact that Team Build had on the financial institution.
What is Team Build?
Team Build is a toolkit that enables the creation of git-native workflows and automation for z/OS applications. Originally, it supplemented the hybrid git experience of Endevor Bridge for Git with Endevor, providing developers with a means of building their changes outside Endevor before synchronizing them.
But it was and continues to be much more.
Team Build includes bldz, a lightweight build engine for z/OS applications, syncz, a synchronization tool between local workspaces and z/OS Unix directories, sbomz, an SBOM generator for z/OS-based applications, and exportz, an integration with Endevor to export and manage processor information for the aforementioned developer builds.
The respective components of Team Build were created with flexibility and scripting in mind, with such extras as:
- A JavaScript standard library for common compile and automation actions that allows teams to quickly produce build scripts in bldz
- Issuing remote shell commands in syncz
- Retrieval of Endevor elements for a project and conversion of translated JCL to bldz-compatible JavaScript in exportz
- Validation of signatures and hashes for SBOMs in the CLI of sbomz
Ultimately the components are meant to be used together to establish workflow automation that can be integrated into your existing CI/CD platform, be it Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Git, or anything else.
Common use cases
The common entry point to Team Build is indeed using exportz to generate build scripts for applications that have been synchronized to git repositories via Bridge for Git. exportz also enables the extraction of those applications to git outside of using Bridge, so it can really jump-start a gradual move of development activities from Endevor to the IDE of a developer’s choice.
Other teams have perhaps already moved or extracted a z/OS application from their mainframe SCM and are testing the git waters. Team Build projects can be quickly authored for these source code repos by using the bldz standard library.
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Compiling and linking can be as simple as running from a directory of COBOL artifacts and invoking a compileAndBind function:
With the growing requirements around software supply chain security, sbomz is another starting point for a lot of development teams. They can easily configure the generation of SBOMs for their software packages, Endevor packages, or data sets and files within pipelines to meet their organizational expectations around validating application changes through the life cycle.
The Big Impact
Greg Spranger has been helping the financial institution modernize its mainframe development workflow and integrate it with common enterprise tooling for a little over a year.
At a high level, the institution developed a gateway which has pulled the mainframe out of its isolated silo and integrated it seamlessly with standard enterprise tooling.
Mainframe applications are now managed in GitHub, developed in VS Code using the Code4z extension pack. Developers make changes and synchronize and build them on the mainframe with syncz and bldz. Then the packages are published to JFrog Artifactory, and ultimately deployed using automation scripted with bldz.
The big impact of Team Build for this institution?
Fully transitioning to managing its z/OS application development via Git and the retirement of their legacy mainframe SCM.
As Spranger describes, “we’re somewhere north of 80,000 different components that we’ve been able to extract out of the mainframe and it’s now fully part of a very normal software development lifecycle,” all using the common tooling across the enterprise.
It is not just about the common tooling and the successful migration to Git. By aligning with the standard CI/CD pipelines across the organization, the mainframe development teams’ lead times have been significantly reduced.
In addition, they achieved the enablement of “hybrid developers” and effectively expanded their talent pool of who can develop for the mainframe. For them, a hybrid developer is someone who can easily switch from working on a cloud-native application in the morning to working on a mainframe application in the afternoon, all because the tooling and pipelines are exactly the same.
And because the tooling is all the same, mainframe developers have access to all the leading-edge generative AI technologies being made available in the institution. At the same time, those that are new to the mainframe can easily leverage AI to navigate and understand complex COBOL codebases.
It has been an incredible journey for the financial institution, and they are not in the least resting on what they have created. Instead, they are rolling out the setup to other divisions and tailoring it to increasing numbers of requests.
Takeaways
The crucial part of the financial institution’s story and something that other customers are quick to share about Team Build is that it really enables integration with existing tooling.
Because the components are “small,” lightweight and easily installed, and because Team Build includes a built-in standard library and enables customization in JavaScript, DevOps engineers pick up the tooling quite readily.
What the impact might be on your business simply depends on what goals you have set for the development and management of your z/OS applications.
But that is really something for you to discover by giving Team Build a try. Request a Workshop to go hands-on with Team Build and the rest of our DevOps Suite.
For more information, check out the Team Build product page for a variety of resources.
And if you are curious about having a Mainframe Expert help you with a modernization project, just as Greg Spranger provided, reach out via the Broadcom Beyond Code site.
