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CA  announced the integration of CA Endevor Software Change Manager (CA Endevor SCM), CA's change management solution, and IBM's Rational Developer for System z (RDz) V7.6, the IBM Rational mainframe development environment. This new integration is designed to significantly simplify the development and management of mainframe software by streamlining application updates, reducing change-related programming errors, and facilitating compliance audits.

Many mainframe developers already use both RDz as their integrated development environment (IDE) and CA Endevor SCM for automating software lifecycle management tasks such as code merging, versioning, and change tracking. This integration gives customers the ability to seamlessly link related development and software lifecycle management tasks.

"Our users continue to tell us how important it is that RDz integrate with tools like CA Endevor SCM that maintain rigorous control over all phases of the development-and-release process," said Charles Chu, IBM director, Enterprise Modernization & Compilers. "By unifying these previously disparate operations, our mutual customers can even more efficiently exploit the special attributes of the IBM System z platform -- which include exceptional scalability, reliability, security, and adaptability."

With this integration, a programmer using RDz, for example, can extract the elements of an application within CA Endevor SCM that is awaiting modification, perform that modification, and then store the changes back into CA Endevor SCM for acceptance into the next release of the application. The CA Endevor SCM edit environment now includes key RDz functions such as content assist and smart syntax check -- along with ISPF look-and-feel. When completed, the changes are placed back into CA Endevor SCM so users can take advantage of all CA Endevor SCM controls and build functionality. This unified approach to coding and release management can now improve productivity, accelerate time-to-delivery, and enable the auditability of programmer activities.

"CA continues to work closely with IBM to optimize the total business value that IT organizations can get from their investments in System z mainframe hardware and software," said Aline Gerew, senior vice president of software engineering in CA's Mainframe Business Unit. "The integration of CA Endevor SCM and IBM's RDz is particularly useful for development teams looking to drive computing workloads back to the mainframe in order to drive down costs and deliver superior service levels."

The integration also enables RDz users to:

• View CA Endevor SCM elements.
• Retrieve CA Endevor SCM elements to an RDz project in order to take advantage of the rich RDz functionality.
• Filter the RDz views by environment, system, subsystem, stage ID, and element to narrow down the number of elements that are visible at any given time.
• Create multiple views using different combinations of environment, system, subsystem, stage ID, and element to help better organize the elements that are being accessed.
• Copy projects into CA Endevor SCM to leverage all the CA Endevor SCM controls.
• Use RDz to invoke CA Endevor SCM's build functions.
• Compare the history and version of CA Endevor SCM elements with the RDz visual compare.
  

This integration supports CA's Mainframe 2.0 initiative by reducing the cost of mainframe ownership and making it easy for a new generation of IT professionals to assume responsibility for mainframe management tasks. Customers can also use CA Mainframe Software Manager, a core Mainframe 2.0 deliverable, to automate the acquisition and installation of CA Endevor SCM.

CA Testing Tools Achieve Ready for IBM Rational Validation
CA also announced that the common graphical user interface (GUI) of CA InterTest for CICS r8.5 and CA InterTest Batch r8.5, which is based on the Eclipse Platform, has attained Ready for IBM Rational software validation and Best Practice Compliance status. This demonstrates that the GUI meets IBM Rational's requirements for integration and interoperability.

The CA InterTest GUI helps developers efficiently re-use and re-purpose existing mainframe application code in order to further improve productivity and support service oriented architecture (SOA) implementations. By plugging CA InterTest tools into their larger Eclipse-based integrated development environments, customers can more easily debug end-to-end composite applications that include mainframe, distributed, web and/or mobile components.

"The integration of CA Endevor SCM and IBM's Rational Developer for System z will help organizations improve staff productivity and safeguard application integrity at a time when both of these issues are of greater concern to us than ever," said Sharon Manno, president of the Endevor and Testing Tools Global User Communities. "IBM's validation of the CA InterTest solutions is also valuable because of the way it helps ensure the quality of new, modified, and re-purposed code before we roll it out into the production environment."