Benefits: How iTKO LISA Drives Value
SOA adoption is being driven by the promise of business agility and cost benefits, through loose coupling and reuse of technology assets. The tools to build and deploy SOA applications are available, but the means to properly ensure quality in these systems has lagged behind this delivery capability. In order to achieve the value expected from SOA, enterprises need to address the complexity of heterogeneous SOA environments, and the associated business risk of costly failures.
The tipping point of SOA Testing Value. As shown above, the cost of testing, and the risk of failure, increase significantly when the rate of Change in IT (increased iterations and new connections) and the Complexity (increased number of components, services and standards) grow. Failure to properly test will inhibit the agility of the company to release as often as needed, as well as forcing the company to shy away from new, value added functionality.
SOA aligns technology around the business requirements of multiple stakeholders involved in the application - so no true SOA is built on a single technology standard. Continuous testing and validation must occur at every layer of the SOA architecture at every stage in the development, testing and deployment lifecycle. Without building Quality Lifecycle processes into the ongoing practice of creating and using services-based apps, the enterprise cannot accomplish the Trust necessary for successful SOA.
Value for Quality Professionals and Engineers
Software professionals know testing early and often is essential to having reliable software and reducing the risk of costly failures. However for complex Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications, testing can no longer simply be a phase in the development process. How is testing SOA different from testing typical applications? To avoid the unintended consequences of change in SOA applications, continuous functional and performance monitoring of the business workflow must occur.
- SOA is by nature a heterogeneous environment, so tests must be able to invoke and verify functionality and performance at every layer of the architecture.
- In SOA, most of the business logic does not reside in the user interface, so tests must span multiple layers of the architecture and support dynamic test data.
- Management, Policy and Testing are the key supports for an SOA governance strategy. Good SOA testing practices contribute verifiable examples of Policy that are shared throughout the management process.
- Continuous testing must happen at both build and runtime, as each layer of SOA applications can be developed and introduced into the active deployment on its own lifecycle.
- Extensibility of SOA testing is important, since all enterprise environments contain legacy applications and custom components that contain key business functionality.
Value for Architects
Architecturally, your job is to set the organization on the right path toward SOA. - both for the ability to properly Govern your technology assets to meet business needs, but to prove that your interoperability with third parties and legacy applications meets those business goals. LISA enables Trust, both vertically within the chain of command, and horizontally across departments and business partners, can only happen with a shared vision for Lifecycle Quality, and a shared capability to automate and collaborate on continuous SOA testing.
- There are multiple valid approaches to constructing SOA applications. LISA supports WS-* approaches, enterprise Java, ESB, REST and other design patterns that may be used as part of an SOA strategy.
- Testing must enforce that Policies are met at a shared level across the extended set of stakeholders in SOA, while respecting the autonomy of multiple Federated authority domains.
- LISA allows Publishers and Consumers of services to share a common platform for certifying and validating that the SOA workflows are sustainable as conditions change.
- While Structural integrity and Performance are important and tested with LISA, Functional Monitoring is another key aspect of effective SOA that cannot be put off until deployment time.
Value for Managing and Governing IT
Companies are driven toward SOA by the promise of business agility and reuse. But SOA also creates constant change - which creates business risk due to software failures and misinterpreted requirements. To ensure the level of reliability and trust needed for mission-critical operations, the company must makes sure Quality is embedded into the lifecycle of the SOA. Testing must happen from the time the architecture is designed, through development and integration, and continuously at runtime as conditions change.
- Provides automated risk management. You canât just test expect developers to find bugs at the code level or wait until the application is done at UI acceptance testing. LISA tests continuously, not only for structural or performance problems at runtime, but functional errors - business mistakes that can be particularly costly and hard to detect.
- LISA enforces a real lifecycle quality process alongside the development and delivery processes, enabling real SOA Governance via robust, test-enforceable Policies.
- A shift in processes change is often resisted within an organization. iTKO has extensive experience and best practices in guiding teams toward realizing the benefits of a SOA quality strategy.
- The implementation and training process for LISA is extremely rapid and low-impact, since LISA is easy for teams to learn and tests most technologies involved in SOA right out of the box.
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