LISA Validate

Continuously Validate Application Outcomes to Mitigate the Risk of Change

Change happens continuously in distributed application architectures, creating a daunting number of "testable" events. iTKO's LISA^TM Validate provides continuous or event-based validation of functional and performance outcomes to reduce the risks and unintended consequences of change. Using LISA Validate, organizations can significantly improve application quality, minimize system downtime, and ensure adherence to Service Level Agreements.

The Challenge: Unintended Consequences of Change

With many teams and heterogeneous components working together to create today's distributed application environments, there is no longer a single point-in-time release event. Instead, when a service is added or changed, it has the potential to cause multiple "ripple effects" on other upstream and downstream dependent systems. To mitigate these risks, companies may employ various governance and policy management tools as part of their development and release processes. However, these approaches lack the ability to validate the actual business outcomes expected by the application, and therefore can't effectively monitor and identify potentially disruptive changes when they are introduced during the software lifecycle.

The Solution: Continuous and Event-Based Validation

LISA Validate provides "always on" continuous validation capabilities to ensure that business requirements and policies are reliably met in the face of constant change. LISA Validate can execute automated regression and performance test suites at various stages across the software lifecycle. When a change to an underlying service is made, or if an unexpected error or performance requirement is not met, LISA Validate can notify the stakeholders or report the activity to the appropriate SOA governance, ALM, or IT Management platform. Common implementation scenarios include:

• Continuous Build Testing: Prior to a new software release, LISA runs a suite of automated regression tests to validate results and provide a pass/fail for the build before it is approved.
• Production Environment Testing: LISA simulates customer interactions to proactively identify errors and performance problems in production. LISA's "synthetic users" can be differentiated from live users, so applications can prioritize the response when appropriate.
• Governance and Policy Enforcement: LISA interoperates with UDDI registry/repositories and other governance infrastructures to strengthen policy verification and enforcement. This can be implemented across the lifecycle to ensure that published and consumed services meet defined structural, behavioral and performance requirements at design time, change time and runtime.

LISA Validate Features:

• Continuous Validation Engine: LISA's validation engine run on scheduled intervals and also triggered by change events across the lifecycle. It can execute any number of automated functional and performance tests and integrates readily with build management tools to create a quality gateway for agile software lifecycles.
• Continuous Validation Monitoring: LISA gathers system-wide and component-level metrics across the end-to-end application and can feed them into your IT operations dashboard or alerting mechanism of choice. A powerful monitoring dashboard is included to present test failure conditions, simulation results, role-based reports, real-time alerts, and more.
• Policy Validation: LISA integrates with leading registry/repository products including SoftwareAG CentraSite (Infravio), HP Systinet, SOA Software Workbench, Oracle Fusion (BEA), and others. These platforms can directly call LISA to validate service policies when promoting a service or service change. LISA can provide pass/fail results and metrics into the repository, and assert that necessary tests have been run prior to deploying services at build or change time.

LISA Validate Benefits:

LISA Validate can help your organization:

• Lower application risks through continuous validation of expected functional and systems outcomes across the software lifecycle.
• Improve trust, collaboration and productivity across disparate operational groups by providing critical governance oversight and policy enforcement.
• Proactively enforce software quality in production to minimize system downtime, lower support costs, and ensure adherence to Service Level Agreements.
• Deliver new capabilities faster in federated application architectures to keep pace with a rapidly evolving environment.
With LISA Validate, you can deliver a more responsive and reliable system that consistently delivers higher quality capabilities, even for the most complex and distributed environments.

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.