iTKO's LISA Product Suite

Removing Constraints and Risks for Cloud Application Development

iTKO's LISA product suite helps customers move enterprise applications into the Cloud at lower cost and risk, and overcomes the root cause challenges of ensuring quality and agility for complex, distributed applications.

IT organizations have changed their approach to enterprise applications - from large and monolithic implementations, to ones that are more dynamic, distributed, and heterogeneous in nature. Cloud-based applications are a natural evolution from recent application architectures, and provide unique advantages for on-demand provisioning and elastic computing capacity with a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

This shift toward Cloud and other distributed application architectures, along with the popularity of agile development techniques, has had the unintended consequence of increasing application cost and risk due to increasing complexity and frequent change. In order to achieve original agility and cost saving benefits, several challenges must be resolved:

The Challenge: Reducing Costs and Risks in Complex, Rapidly Changing Environments

Some of the key challenges to address include:

• Unavailability of dependent systems during the software development lifecycle, resulting in missed release deadlines, wasted resources, and an inability to deliver needed functionality.
• Lack of transparency across heterogeneous technologies and application tiers to effectively trace defects to their source and resolve them.
• Costly and time-consuming management of volatile test data needed to work with distributed services and sensitive systems of record.
• Software failures in production due to insufficient performance lab automation and error-prone manual regressions.
• Limited availability of test lab environments due to high costs and lengthy setup and configuration.
• Lack of control over, and per-use access costs of third-party systems owned by other groups, such as mainframes, SaaS and Cloud resources
• Poor collaboration across teams that have become more decentralized and distributed.

The Solution: LISA Product Suite

LISA is an integrated product suite that provides quality coverage from development to delivery while eliminating costs, constraints and risks throughout the software lifecycle. The LISA product suite includes the following:

• LISA Virtualize: Eliminates dependency constraints caused by unavailable or inaccessible systems by simulating their dynamic behavior, data and performance. The resulting virtual models can be made available 24/7 for development and testing purposes to accelerate time-to-market, streamline test data management, and lower infrastructure costs.
• LISA Test: An automated end-to-end testing solution that directly verifies heterogeneous technologies across all application tiers in a codeless environment. LISA Test automates unit, functional, regression, system integration, load and performance testing to provide teams with end-to-end, automated test coverage for improved quality and greater efficiency.
• LISA Validate: Prevents the unintended consequences of change by validating functional and business outcomes continuously and at every change event in the lifecycle for underlying components and end-to-end processes. LISA Validate lowers risk and builds trust across distributed systems and teams, and works in conjunction with governance and policy infrastructures.
• LISA Pathfinder: Provides complete transparency and traceability across all application tiers to quickly identify root cause defects, streamline defect collaboration between Development and QA, and automatically generate detailed regressions and virtual models to ensure faster issue resolution.

The 4 C's Approach to Optimize the Cloud Application Lifecycle

Enterprise applications need flexibility and agility to successfully respond to changing business needs. Virtual service environments are easily customized and leveraged freely across teams to remove critical delays and dependency constraints. LISA facilitates shared responsibility earlier in the lifecycle and across key stakeholders. This is realized with complete, automated test coverage and full traceability and transparency to enable rapid defect discovery and efficient collaboration to resolve them. Finally, business risks must be reduced by continuously validating outcomes at change-events across the lifecycle to minimize the unintended consequences of change.

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