Capstone Projects

A GnuCOBOL program that records income and expenses in a line-sequential file, categorizes them with 88-levels, and prints a monthly summary with edited amounts and category totals.

Project 1 — Personal finance ledger (beginner)

A GnuCOBOL program that records income and expenses in a line-sequential file, categorizes them with 88-levels, and prints a monthly summary with edited amounts and category totals. *Concepts: PICTURE editing, arithmetic, sequential files, EVALUATE, control totals.*

Project 2 — Student grading system (beginner/intermediate)

Read student records with several test scores, compute averages with ROUNDED, assign letter grades with EVALUATE TRUE, rank students with SORT, and produce a class report with page headings and statistics (MEAN, MEDIAN, STANDARD-DEVIATION). *Concepts: tables, intrinsic functions, SORT with OUTPUT PROCEDURE, reports.*

Project 3 — Payroll batch (intermediate)

Employee master (indexed) + timesheet transactions: gross pay with overtime rules, tax and deduction tables loaded at startup and searched with SEARCH ALL, pay slips, and a payroll register with department control breaks. *Concepts: indexed files, table lookup, control breaks, subprograms, copybooks.*

Project 4 — Inventory management with Report Writer (intermediate)

Product master maintenance (add/change/delete transactions with validation and an error report), reorder-point alerts, and a stock valuation report written with Report Writer. *Concepts: master-file update, validation, Report Writer, FILE STATUS handling.*

Project 5 — Banking core batch on z/OS (advanced)

Daily cycle in JCL: sort transactions, update a VSAM KSDS account master, calculate interest, generate statements, create a GDG backup, and handle restart after failure. Use IBM Z Xplore for a real z/OS environment. *Concepts: JCL, VSAM, IDCAMS, GDGs, DFSORT, return codes, checkpoint/restart.*

Project 6 — Db2 claims processing (advanced)

An insurance claims system in COBOL with embedded SQL: cursor-driven batch adjudication with commit intervals, indicator variables for nullable columns, error handling with SQLCODE, and a summary report. *Concepts: embedded SQL, cursors, COMMIT strategy, DCLGEN, BIND.*

Project 7 — CICS online banking (expert)

A pseudo-conversational CICS application with BMS maps: sign-on, account inquiry, funds transfer between accounts (with SYNCPOINT and error back-out), and transaction history browse, using channels and containers between programs. *Concepts: CICS commands, BMS, COMMAREA/channels, VSAM or Db2 access, recovery.*

Project 8 — Modernized COBOL service with DevOps (expert)

Take a COBOL business-rule module, add COBOL Check unit tests, store it in Git, build with a CI pipeline (GnuCOBOL off-platform + DBB on z/OS via Zowe CLI), expose it as a REST API with z/OS Connect, and generate/consume JSON with JSON GENERATE/JSON PARSE. *Concepts: testing, Git, Zowe, CI/CD, APIs, JSON, modernization.*