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This document was last updated on February 19, 2021.

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. Over the following couple of years, the tool was adopted by several mainframe Cobol development teams at that company.

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 - mainly to add support for mocks - 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 this fork, which is in use: https://github.com/Rune-Christensen/cobol-unit-test.

Separately, Compuware and Micro Focus have expressed interest in the project, and more recently the Open Mainframe Project.

Noting the growing interest in mainframe systems and the Cobol language, Dave decided to pay the project a little more attention than he had done. He started the cobol-check project in December, 2020, with the aim of rewriting cobol-unit-test in a language better suited to text processing. The original is written in Cobol. Cobol-check is a Java project.

Currently (December, 2020) the focus of development is to reproduce the functionality supported by cobol-unit-test. From there, we intend to address issues pertaining to functionality and support for different versions of Cobol, and to add functionality based on user demand.