IBM OLIVER (CICS interactive test/debug)

OLIVER (CICS interactive test/debug) was a proprietary testing and debugging toolkit for interactively testing programs designed to run on IBM's Customer Information Control System (CICS) on IBM's System/360/370/390 architecture.

It provided instruction step, conditional program breakpoint ("Pause") and storage alteration features for Assembler, COBOL and PL/I programs. High level language (HLL) users were able to see and modify variables directly at a breakpoint.

Oliver also provided fully automatic features to prevent application program errors such as Program Check, "Wild branch" , "illegal SVC" and "CICS AICA" Abends ("program loop"). It was possible to correct many errors and interactively alter the control flow of the executing application program. This permitted more errors to be detected for each compilation which, at the time, were often scheduled batch jobs with printed output, often requiring several hours "turnaround" before eventually re-loading the program (using CSMT/CEMT Newcopy) and retrying the failing transaction.

It additionally provided storage protection features to prevent rogue applications from overwriting storage ("storage violations") occupied by other applications, system tables and other kernel code.

See also

  • Assembly language
  • CICS
  • Computer programming
  • Core dump
  • Memory debugger
  • Software testing
  • SIMON (Batch Interactive test/debug)

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