LISA Features: LISA Validation for SOA Governance Platforms (UDDI, Registry, Repository)

iTKO's LISA SOA Testing & Validation software offers UDDI interaction and direct functional and performance validation functionality for SOA Governance Registries & Repositories, to help your enterprise realize the expected benefits of these new systems of record.

The Challenge

The advent of SOA Governance tools such as Registry/Repositories for services has provided a central reference point for available services. However, these assets have yet to realize their true potential ROI. This happens because in practice, the ability to state expected policies and store service assets does not automatically verify and enforce that the expected SOA Policies are being met. In most cases, validation isn't automated at all, it is literally text describing the intended policy or a click-by-click "screen test" that doesn't hold up against any sort of dynamic data-driven application.

Strict "Compliance" validation is an important checkpoint, whether that is custom-defined or standards-based (for instance, the OASIS base definitions). While WS-I and WS-Security are a great start, when it comes to validating the services operating in the field, we have yet to see a real WS-I Basic Profile compliant service in use today. There is always something custom or proprietary about the way services are published, because they aren't constructed by hand. The way you build the service defines what platform it is compatible with, be it Axis, or via BEA WebLogic, or Microsoft, or any number of platforms to define that service.

Read more about Structural Validation practices from ITKO here >>

You want the SOA Governance, but out of the box, none of the services are fully compliant with that "compliance" definition of success. And we can't add the step of manually recoding that working service to make it compliant within the limitations of the standard - because if it is already working, that introduces risk.

The LISA Solution

LISA offers automated discovery, test creation, automation and execution against your SOA assets, drastically improving your visibility and control over the entire SOA governance process. LISA tests become a key certification checkpoint whenever Services are published into the registry, and they can also set forth an enforceable SOA Policy when they are checked in by service consumers.

Benefits

• Faster Test Creation to Validate Policies: LISA offers a no-code environment for creating and staging tests against Services and their underlying layers. Both developers and non-technical team members can rapidly author test cases that genuinely validate that expected Policies are being met, and these tests can become valuable assets in your governance strategy.
• Virtual Endpoint Testing & Lookup: As SOA Governance practices evolve, the Registry/Repository is becoming a system of reference for flexibly building and managing the services that inhabit a loosely coupled environment. LISA interoperates with Type 2 and 3 UDDI registries and service repositories from leading providers such as CentraSite, Infravio, Systinet, BEA/Flashline, and others, providing a way to leverage them for lookup of the most recent services during test design, and dynamic "hookup" of services and virtual services during test runs through the registry, depending on the type of transaction.
• Continuously Verifying SOA Policies: LISA tests provide an excellent way to check in SOA Tests as enforceable and verifiable SOA Policy examples alongside services in the repository. Leading enterprise and public sector customers are using LISA as a quality certification platform to ensure trust across multiple services, and the divisions and teams that build, support, and leverage them. LISA supports both the process of Publishing services to a larger community with verifiable service levels, as well as Consuming services with well-defined requirements.
• Service-Oriented Virtualization. The ability to virtualize services using LISA VSE provides a compelling way to keep all of your distributed teams developing and testing in parallel, rather than waiting for access to constrained live services. LISA can represent simulated Virtual Services in your registry alongside the real service, thereby letting teams certify against the live service, while testing against the available LISA Virtual Service model.

LISA extends the software quality lifecycle into new SOA Governance and business process technologies, while enhancing Complete, Collaborative and Continuous SOA Testing capabilities, to create a shared environment for reducing the overall risk inherent in rapidly changing IT environments. Contact ITKO today for more information on how your company can better leverage your Registry/Repository by validating that your Policies are being met in the real world.

To learn more about how LISA incorporates the 4 C's and can address critical development constraints and software reliability challenges in your organization, please contact us, or read more about LISA Virtualize, LISA Validate, LISA Test, and LISA Pathfinder.