Products: iTKO LISA Validate
The "Always On" build time, runtime, and change time quality governance platform
LISA Validate orchestrates the continuous validation aspects of IT and SOA Governance workflows, to ensure that service levels are reliability met, instilling trust throughout the lifecycle of the application. LISA Validate conducts live discovery testing, policy validation, and functional and performance monitoring of critical business workflows on a continuous basis, providing an actionable way to enforce that business requirements are being met.
LISA Validate consists of:
- Workflow Pathfinder: Automates the process of opening up the layers of the application, by driving functional transactions into services, and then capturing and modeling the results, allowing for effective discovery and testing of integration points and components, without having to read code and write complex test harnesses.
- Continuous Monitoring: Continuous validation engine incorporating functional and performance tests, to check for "unintended consequences" of changes anywhere within the software architecture, which can be run on a scheduled interval or launched upon any change or event basis for non-stop coverage of the changing application.
- SOA Policy Validation: Validation for SOA Governance efforts. LISA interoperates with leading UDDI Registry/Repositories, verifying SOA Policies as a point of Policy Verification and Enforcement, and ensuring that all published and consumed services and workflows reliably meet defined Structural, Behavioral and Performance policies across the multiple parties that share SOA instances.
- IT Operations Metrics: Gathers system-wide or component-level metrics (JMX, SNMP, Perfmon, other) from the distributed layers of the application, and feeds them into your IT operations dashboard or alerting mechanism of choice, if there is an error or performance problem.
The Challenge: Solving the Unintended Consequences of Change in Enterprise Applications
Service-based, distributed applications will naturally evolve over time, as they leverage highly interdependent and changing services and technologies, which are assembled to build the finished application at runtime. Continuous Integration is moving from a best practice to a do-or-die tactic. With so many heterogeneous components working together as an application, there is no specified "release date" for a build of your application. So when a service is added or changed, it has the potential to cause a "ripple effect" on other dependent upstream and downstream workflows.
In order to manage the business risk of this change, companies seek to employ ITL and SOA Governance practices, to ensure that IT Management, Policy and Testing are all incorporated into their development and release strategies. LISA Validate's "Always On" testing provides a key enabler for Quality of Service (QoS), ensuring that Policies and business requirements are reliably met.
How LISA's Continuous Validation works
LISA Validate is deployed as a server-side application, and can be used as a shared provider of both scheduled and event-based regression and performance test suites. When a change to an underlying application is made, or if an unexpected error or performance expectation is not met, LISA Validate can communicate with the enterprise's stakeholders, or report this activity to an SOA governance, ALM or IT Management platform.
Unintended Consequences Example.
When a change is made to a Service in order to meet a requirement for App 2, LISA's continuous validation can be kicked into action by the build system or monitoring the live apps under an SOA Registry, here pointing out that an error condition created in another dependent application (App 1) due to the change.
With LISA Validate, you gain a strategy for mitigating risk in your service-based applications at build time, run time and change time, bridging the trust gap between SOA Governance initiatives, and the actual software-development and deployment lifecycle.
Features of LISA Validate
- Continuous Integration Testing: LISA tests reside with your source code, and run with your build management process tools, to automatically sync testing with build processes, creating a quality gateway for agile software lifecycles. When a new version of the software is published, LISA's continuous validation is prompted to automatically run a suite of regression tests to validate that the new version does not cause issues elsewhere in the stack. Teams have the option of using this as a means of passing or failing a build before it is approved for go-live.
- Live Environment Testing: By continually simulating real user conditions against live applications with workflows built from your LISA test suites, errors and performance problems can be captured and resolved much faster. LISA Validate can orchestrate this continuous validation process as synthetic users only, so the applications are aware of the distinction between test transactions and live transactions. A powerful test orchestration and reporting dashboard is included, providing notification of test failure conditions and simulation results, with team- and role-based reports and alerting to your business, development and QA stakeholders.
- SOA Governance Platform support: LISA now ties validation closely with the leading Registry/Repository approaches for SOA Governance and management, including SoftwareAG CentraSite (Infravio), HP Systinet, SOA Software Workbench, Oracle FUSION (BEA) and more. These platforms can call LISA test cases to validate expected service policies when promoting a service or service change, and LISA provides pass/fail feedback and metrics into the repository. This allows you to assert that necessary tests have been run before deploying new services, in build and change time.
What is the cost of application failure in your mission-critical applications? Mandating a Policy or a Service Level Agreement is a great way to start, but real functional and performance verification with LISA is where the rubber meets the road. LISA can provide you with a picture of the health of your enterprise apps on a continuous basis, which is what you need if you are relying on mission-critical enterprise applications.
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