LISA Features: Microsoft .NET Solutions
Testing, Validation and Virtualization for .NET Enterprise Application Environments
Enterprise IT teams create complex distributed applications using .NET architectures, seeking to maximize the flexibility of their software while keeping development costs down. While robust sets of development tools and reusable components for .NET are readily available from Microsoft and other vendors, many opportunities still remain for increasing quality and avoiding bottlenecks to the software delivery lifecycle.
Challenges
Microsoft .NET allows developers to rapidly create and deploy software, using a composite application approach that can leverage a variety of Services, data sources and existing components that are integrated into a solution. However with this increase in flexibility, there is an exponential increase in the complexity and rate of change of the software, and conventional unit and acceptance testing and hardware virtualization approaches may fail to keep up.
- Limited tools for system-wide quality. Most approaches to testing .NET-based applications tend to favor the familiar paradigms of Windows GUI testing tools. While "acceptance testing" from a user perspective is useful, waiting for a completed UI to test means testing is delayed until pre-production or production, when the rest of the application and infrastructure is already integrated. This not only creates risk, it exposes software errors when they are costliest to fix. More attention needs to be paid to testing and validating services and systems of record earlier in the lifecycle.
- Bottlenecks due to incomplete or unavailable components. As companies break development groups into smaller, more distributed "agile" teams, a serious new constraint emerges, in the form of critical services and systems of record that are unavailable for testing and development throughout the software lifecycle. While some of these implementations can be replicated by Hardware Virtualization approaches, there are a majority of teams who have problems connecting to systems that are to secure for testing and virtualizing everything.
LISA Benefits for .NET Architectures
LISA supports automated quality assurance for distributed, heterogeneous .NET environments, consisting of web applications, web services and integrated components, which are tied to back-end databases and legacy systems. LISA allows teams to directly test, validate and virtualize these environments without coding or writing a test UI client. These benefits can be easily described via the "4 C's" of software quality and agility:
- Complete. LISA provides broad technology coverage to follow a complex business workflow through .NET environments, validating multiple web sites, rich browser UI elements, web services, BizTalk messaging, SQL databases, and servers within a single test. In addition LISA tests many of the heterogeneous components integrated to .NET environments, with deep extensibility for custom and proprietary software.
- Collaborative. LISA supports every phase of the .NET software lifecycle and attaches easily to your process tools of choice, from unit and regression testing, to validation of service levels and performance, with an intuitive no-code testing process that QA and development teams can share.
- Continuous. LISA continually validates end-to-end scenarios against .NET based service architectures to ensure that expected functional and performance policies are met. This validation reduces the risk of "unintended consequences" that occur when new services are introduced, usage patterns change, or components are changed that may break necessary functionality.
- Constraint-Free. LISA Virtualize provides a Virtual Services Environment (VSE) to model and emulate the behavior of highly constrained, costly or unavailable live services, databases, web apps and shared systems, eliminating dependencies on downstream systems in the environment, and enabling increased agility for testers and developers at drastically lower cost.
Features
- Leading-edge RIA or "Web 2.0" testing allows teams to declaratively test dynamic websites, including functionality such as ActiveX, Silverlight, AJAX and most other browser-based application technologies including AJAX and Restful approaches, for functional and performance purposes.
- Point-and-click .NET WCF compliant web services testing and WSDL/SOAP analysis and interaction.
- LISA supports active user sessions, SSL, authentication settings and expected transaction status, so it lets you test systems end-to-end to ensure expected business outcomes.
- Tie front-end web interface and web service testing to validation of systems of record and databases (SQL Server, or any JDBC-compatible data source) within a single test case.
- No code testing means developers and non-developers can rapidly learn and use LISA, for less time coding tests, and more time collaborating on design and development.
- Reporting natively incorporates key real-time metrics from servers, including SNMP, Windows Perfmon, JMX and more, feeding these metrics into performance dashboards.
- Leverage suites of existing nUnit services, launch LISA from command-line or batch scripts, then roll those same unit and functional tests into regression tests included in nAnt/Make builds. Then take the same test cases and turn them into load and stress tests that can run continuously using LISA's continuous validation services.
- Since LISA test cases and results are saved as XML files, they incorporate easily as attachments to test process, issue tracking and requirements management tools such as HP Test Director for Quality Center and MS Visual Studio test management.
Extend a virtual test environment for mixed deployments with LISA
Most enterprise-level .NET environments are leveraging distributed or service-oriented approaches to software integration. Effectively ensuring quality means development teams need to test, and have the necessary access to test, an alphabet soup of component technologies and third-party services, which may not be managed or developed by your current team.
LISA's broad technology coverage, extensibility and ability to virtualize key constraints away from the lifecycle ensures that .NET teams can operate at maximum productivity, delivering high software quality levels with lower cost and less risk.