The iTKO LISA Suite: Test, Validate & Virtualize
Enabling Quality & Agility for today's complex software environments.
The iTKO LISATM product suite is a unified solution for testing, validating and virtualizing today's complex, rapidly changing business applications. LISA provides quality coverage from design, to development and deployment, while eliminating cost and constraints throughout the software lifecycle. LISA speaks the language of most technologies found within enterprise IT, from rich web apps, to web services, integration layers, Java, databases and more.
LISA is the leading quality framework for distributed, complex enterprise software, encompassing three key capabilities to help teams mitigate risk, and get better results from IT investments:
- LISA Test: A complete and collaborative no-code testing framework that directly verifies all technology layers with a high level of automation, from web, to Java, SOA and Cloud services, so teams can thoroughly test with less effort, and better meet defined requirements.
- LISA Validate: An "always ready" verification engine that continuously validates business processes and system performance, so all parties can assure that each software component supports all customer expectations and service policies, in an auditable form for improved IT governance.
- LISA Virtualize: Captures and simulates the behavior of highly interdependent services, data and systems that teams must build and test their own software against, even when they may not have access to live or completed components.
Challenges: Minimizing the Risk of Complex, Interconnected applications
Today's distributed enterprise software architectures have significantly evolved from yesterday's client-server apps. Approaches such as SOA, BPM and Cloud Computing allow distributed teams to align a variety of systems in a more agile way more closely around business requirements. However, with this increase in agility, additional points of failure are created in the software lifecycle. Tying together the many heterogeneous technologies shared between departments and trading partners over the Internet adds an increasing amount of complexity, interdependency and risk into our software.
Top challenges for enterprise IT include:
- Inadequate Testing: Traditional testing techniques are focused on the user interface, or at the code level alone, and cannot automate testing and extend to support component and middleware-based workflows.
- Unintended Consequences: Individual components and technologies are being changed at their own pace, and the interactions between systems can create severe issues within business processes.
- Dependency on Constrained Systems: Access and capacity constraints on key systems greatly limit the agility of multiple development and test teams and business partners throughout the software lifecycle.
Solutions: LISA's "4 C's" for Quality & Agility
The iTKO LISA suite was developed from the ground up to test multi-tier, distributed applications and SOA architectures. All of LISA's test functionality is a singularly developed platform for ensuring quality and minimizing risk in complex, changing enterprise applications, so there is never a concern about sharing LISA tests and testing processes across technologies and phases of the application lifecycle.
At iTKO, we have been working with customers for years on how to get complex, service-based architectures to deliver on their intended value. We have distilled that domain expertise into LISA, and within a best practices framework we call the "4 C's" for Quality and Agility:
- Complete testing of business workflows across every heterogeneous technology layer of enterprise software, at both a system and component level.
- Collaborative involvement of the whole team in quality throughout the lifecycle. Enable both developers and non-programmers to define and share verifiable test cases that prove how distributed systems meet business requirements.
- Continuous validation of changing software architectures, in design time, and as they are consumed at runtime, ensuring that service levels continue to be met as the system dynamically changes.
- Constraint-Free virtualization, using a Virtual Services Environment (VSE) to model and emulate the behavior of highly constrained or unavailable live services and shared systems, enabling increased agility for testers and developers at drastically lower cost.
LISA expands on the usability and value of its market-leading testing and validation solutions with native integration across client platforms, increased SOA Policy, integration platform and BPM testing support, and robust behavioral virtualization of constrained systems. With LISA, the entire team can create, manage and orchestrate tests, validate business processes, and virtualize service environments to prevent costly application failures and errors. Customers accelerate time-to-market for delivering new functionality, while reducing the overall cost and effort of maintaining high service levels.