History

Cobol-check began life in July, 2014, when a group of technical coaches at a large US bank was facilitating a coding dojo for software engineers who worked at the bank. They were doing the FizzBuzz exercise in a test-first fashion in Java. One of the engineers asked if test-driven development (TDD) was possible only for Java, or if the same approach could be used with other languages. A coach answered that it is possible for most languages, but probably impossible for Cobol.

Dave Nicolette, who had specialized in mainframe development in a former life, took issue with the comment. Over the weekend and subsequent evenings, he hacked up a crude unit testing framework for Cobol. At the next coding dojo for that client, FizzBuzz was done again...this time test-driven in Cobol.

Dave cleaned up the code a bit and created a Github project on August 3, 2014: https://github.com/neopragma/cobol-unit-test. He enhanced it over the next couple of years, but it was largely ignored. Occasionally someone would download it and use it, and some people found it useful enough to make bug fixes and enhancements - notably