MACRO 4 EXTENDS TRACEMASTER WITH SUPPORT FOR CICS APPLICATIONS.

Macro 4 (MAO.L), which earlier this year announced the availability of its new sophisticated interactive program testing product, TRACEMASTER, has announced that its new Version 3.1 adds support for CICS applications in MVS and OS390 environments.

TRACEMASTER3.1 will be available to customers in December. Detailed program testing and debugging traditionally represent about 30 percent of the time required to deploy new applications. TRACEMASTER allows this time to be significantly reduced and, consequently, critical e-business applications and enhancements to legacy solutions can be deployed faster and with greater reliability than before.

The upgrade to TRACEMASTER, which is part of Macro 4's integrated suite of Application Availability tools for OS/390 developers that includes INSYNC and DUMPMASTER, now makes the transition to e-commerce practicable for companies using CICS. The suite will also support the new IBM zSeries servers and z/OS operating system as they become available from IBM.

According to Bill Janulin, Product Support Manager at Macro 4, one of the advantages of TRACEMASTER is how little it interferes with other CICS programs running concurrently. A TRACEMASTER transaction can be initiated by someone with little or no effect on other people doing CICS work. Because TRACEMASTER analyzes a program line by line as it is being executed, and displays the contents in a window in real time, you can find the precise line of the program where the error has occurred, and fix it with minimal delay or disruption to business processes.

TRACEMASTER 3.1 supports source level execution tracing of OS/390 CICS, Assembler and COBOL programs. Key features include: a scripting language for automated testing and customization; logic path coverage analysis; support for an unlimited number of breakpoints; a history of executed statements to allow reverse logic tracing; and the automatic display of variables referenced by the current program statement.