LISA Editions: LISA Extension Kit (LEK)
Test-enable the power of LISA within your custom applications.
Every business has existing applications and business logic that need to be leveraged. Since SOA is heterogeneous, LISA gives you powerful extensibility features to bring testing to your legacy and custom-developed components.
iTKO built LISA's core testing engines to extend using the LISA Extension Kit (LEK), so you can teach LISA to interact with your applications. In addition, the LISA API allows developers to embed testability and LISA instructions within custom or legacy code, providing rich test feedback from within the application under test.
A Test Harness for your software
For years, our hardware-engineering counterparts have understood the need for a test harness. These test beds enable electronics testers to execute an instrumented device in a variety of ways. The device itself reports its failures in such a way that the engineers can quickly diagnose and correct them.
The LISA Extension Kit offers the same level of self-diagnosis within your custom code. Whether issues arise during testing or in production, LISA can give developers tremendous detail and context about what error occurred within their apps.
Features
LISA's extensibility support is unmatched. Many complex enterprise applications, even those that are based on open standards, are built within a custom framework or developed on non-supported platforms that LISA does not yet know about. Using LEK allows LISA users to test custom systems just as natively - without writing test code - as the existing technologies that LISA tests out of the box.
- LEK Translators teach LISA to talk to, analyze, and invoke your applications. For many non-standard applications, enables test automation where it was simply impossible before, with any tool. You use LEK to write "custom steps" in LISA that understand the custom test attributes of the target object. Once the custom step is written, QA teams can easily reuse it within their own test workflows.
- LEK Artifacts teach your applications to talk to LISA. By embedding LISA API in your code, your application becomes self-reporting to LISA test cases, communicating data and metrics directly to the tester or a running scheduled test on LISA Server.
- LISA Secure Channel gives you live test interaction that flows between tested systems and LISA. Your application communicates directly with LISA, so you can act and respond to rich debugging information without exposing that data to end users or hackers.
- LISA API is a simple command set you briefly invoke within your code. There's no phone book manual. A couple dozen commands are all your developers need to know.
- Comprehensive definitions. The LEK comes with presets, offering starting points for the most common frameworks, including a JSP tag library, XML tag definitions (for any web technology including .NET), Servlet integrations, EJB/Java object APIs, WSDL/Web services and more.
- Easy installation. If you have a license for LEK (licensed as an add-on), all you need to do is put our LEK toolkit in the LISA directory.
Benefits
Instead of a test case author having to figure out if a custom system transaction succeeded or failed, the system can report that condition directly to the tester through LISA. When the resulting LISA test reports are given back to the developer, not only does the test case provide a concrete means of reproducing the issue, but the report provides all the logging, exceptions and health data that was instrumented into the server.
- Lets you ensure quality in formerly "untestable" systems. Rather than writing off your custom application as unsupported, iTKO gives you a test harness for these technologies. Instrumenting your apps with LEK gives you more focused, repeatable testing in LISA, and this stability gives you clearer context and a full stack trace for testing the actual business functionality.
- Saves significant development cost. The component or code itself can be instrumented, so that when QA teams and AT tools report issues, the development team will get the required data from within the software to quickly identify and resolve the issue. By adding another 1-2% of development effort on enablement, the whole team can get rich internal metrics and error reports out of their systems, capturing an additional 25-30% reduction in time spent later on debugging and error correction.
- Creates self-reporting applications. LEK commands allow your apps to report on their own health, and can even trigger exceptions and alerts that control or fail a running LISA test.
- Allows the whole team to test. LISA already eliminates the communication gap between distributed development and testing teams by offering a no-code way for everyone to test. Test enabled applications expose deeper interaction to LISA, allowing QA teams and non-development teams to test and share actionable (and reliable) proof of exactly where problems are happening.
How LISA Extensibility works (Technical)
As shown above, LISA's core engine and framework were built by iTKO to allow for easy addition of new, as yet undiscovered test steps using the LEK toolset. LEK extends LISA as the test harness for any custom or complex component within your software. LEK is essentially a common set of controls that LISA and a running application can use to communicate information. Developers can quickly leverage LISA's LEK framework to do this, both passively and actively.
When LISA is testing an application, it enables LEK activities to occur. Otherwise, LEK remains dormant and out of the way. When testing a "harnessed" system, developers have LEK pass information to LISA like exceptions and log messages. A developer can also actively send specific data to a test running on LISA Server for validation, which can help in root cause analysis of where problems may be. LEK lets developers provide insight into the application from the testing framework.
When LISA is executing the system under test, the LISA Extension API in the server creates an out-of-band communication channel with LISA itself. This communication channel is server-type specific - a must-have for debugging secure, Internet-based applications such as eCommerce. Through this channel, LISA receives a wealth of context, logging, and instructions authored by the developer when test-enabling the system. Once the LEK extension is written, even your proprietary system becomes available to all LISA users as a Custom test Step for no-code test case authoring.
A simple install attaches a licensed copy of LEK to LISA. iTKO provides developers with a distributable SDK for the Application side of the LEK. Developers simply include the SDK in their application and code LISA calls to the API. In the case of non-Java web applications, some features can be used with the basic XML/HTML tag definitions and require nothing added to the application but the use of LEK tags in appropriate ways. Developers embed and invoke the LISA Extension API within their code at appropriate times, such as: when error conditions occur; important logging or tracking information should be saved; or when assertions on success or failure should be determined at a system level. These invocations of the LISA Extension API are frequently embedded as only 1 or 2 lines of code.
For more information on Functional Testing features, download the LISA Product Sheet. >>