iTKO | Software Testing Quality Assurance Testing Tools

Our Mission

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Our Mission

Talk about Risk at the rate of change. iTKO was founded on the concept that everyone should own quality^TM. Quality is everyone's right. And everyone's responsibility. We believe testing must be a democracy in order to succeed. So our solutions are not just designed for developers. When you have the whole team involved, including business owners and QA analysts, you can truly deliver with confidence.

We are tightly focused on delivering testing solutions for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications, because we believe this is where the future of enterprise development is going. The ability to assemble applications from distributed components offers distinct advantages for the responsiveness and flexibility of business development. However, with the exponential increase in options enabled by SOA applications comes an exponential increase in potential points of application failure. iTKO believes the current market for SOA testing falls woefully short of allowing companies to deliver with confidence. We are determined to change that.

In Software, Mistakes Hurt, but Misunderstandings Kill.

Besides correcting mistakes, quality is about avoiding the misunderstandings that can kill otherwise great businesses. Failures and risk can be minimized when development is aligned with business strategy. Our LISA software marries deep testing and analysis functionality that developers need, with the ease of use required to give non-technical users visibility into the development process.

Quality is a proven lever for increased business value in manufacturing, product design and customer service. Despite emerging standards, the software side of business has failed to realize quality. The overall failure rate of enterprise development has remained steady, with only 25 percent of implementation projects successfully meeting budget and timeline. Errors in deployed systems amount to US$59.6 billion in annual costs, according to industry estimates.

Companies try to leverage their existing systems alongside emerging technologies for a competitive edge. While SOA standards and web services improve widespread connectivity among business systems to meet requirements, this ease of assembly conceals much of the complexity of supporting an ever-growing set of integration points, thereby increasing the risk of enterprise development.

If we need development quality, why hasn't automated testing become a standard? We've found that almost every customer we talk to wants to do more rigorous test automation. But the existing tools they had were just too hard to use, and inevitably ended up as shelfware. So most firms revert to largely manual development and QA testing processes.

When you do the math, you realize that it is simply infeasible to thoroughly test a system manually. Developers can unit test what they believe is a right outcome, but they are usually the least qualified to validate that the actual business requirements are met. QA teams can test for front-end bugs, but they have no visibility into the root cause of the errors they find. And no manual test can uncover the long-term effects of sustained or highly variable use on a system.

Many enterprises have invested huge sums into automated testing solutions. In practice, teams will admit that these solutions often end up as shelfware. This occurs for several reasons:

• Tight timelines cause QA processes to get left out of the requirement and design phases of development
• Developers are still expected to write code, and write test code at the same time
• The testing tools are too complex for business owners and QA teams to use and understand
• Testing reports failures, but doesn't uncover exactly where the error occurred
• High total cost of ownership (TCO) of per-user, per-component licensing, implementation and training costs limits the number of participants in the testing process
• Existing tools do not provide true automated test coverage of all the components of a complex SOA environment

Simply mandating quality will not make it happen in software development. Executives need to set realistic standards for quality improvement and get buy-in from the developers and analysts who must work with the testing solution. Quality should be top priority for every participant in the development process, not just developers.

Contact us to learn more.