Optimizing your HP/Mercury Tools for SOA with iTKO
Enhance your HP/Mercury LoadRunner testing and QualityCenter processes across the full SOA lifecycle with iTKO LISA.
Leading companies have made significant quality investments in HP/Mercury solutions, and in the skilled teams that use these tools to support testing, development and IT management processes. How can the enterprise extend the value of these tools, to test today's highly interconnected SOA applications, which are becoming the de facto standard for delivering business functionality?
LISA provides an SOA-ready Test, Validation and Virtualization solution for HP/Mercury testing and IT Governance frameworks, including QualityCenter (TestDirector), QuickTestPro (QTP), Performance Center (LoadRunner) and Systinet. With LISA, your teams can create immediate value, by enhancing the functionality of these leading tools to test SOA applications across the full lifecycle of design, change, and runtime processes.
Solving SOA Challenges for HP/Mercury customers
Traditionally, functional and load testing was conducted near the end of the development process, when there was a near-finished application with a user interface to test against. While this worked for applications developed within a centrally controlled environment, today's services-based applications contain many distributed middle-tier technologies and external services, each of which is changing on their own lifecycle. HP/Mercury customers face several new challenges presented by SOA applications:
- Incomplete Test Coverage: Traditional testing techniques can test against the UI or a specific technology, but they cannot automate testing across SOA services, components and middleware-based workflows. Test coverage is often measured by the number of manual tests run.
- Unintended Consequences of Change: Individual components and technologies are changing at their own pace, and can create severe issues within business processes. Procedural testing approaches are not flexible or reusable enough to keep up with this rate of change â more test automation is needed.
- Dependency on Constrained Systems: Access and capacity constraints on key systems greatly reduces agility, as many needed technologies and components are unavailable for functional and load testing activities.
- Lack of Needed Control for Governance: Governance or service managment techniques are useful for dictating standards and policies, but they also need to validate and enforce that policies meet expectations within the architecture.
Many companies are struggling with production-level defects, SLA issues and late delivery, even after expending significant effort and cost on quality initiatives. iTKO LISA can increase your ROI on these efforts, by allowing your teams to Test, Validate and Virtualize today's SOA architectures within your existing HP Testing and IT Operations processes, for a higher level of quality coverage at a lower cost.
How iTKO LISA supports HP/Mercury Solutions for SOA
LISA was built from the ground up to validate all of the middle tiers your testing processes need to touch: from web services, to the message bus, Java servers/ESB platforms, POJOs, and many legacy objects. In addition, our Virtualization capabilities extend this value beyond the data center by simulating a ready services environment for testing. These results are noted here:
Here are three key integration points for maximizing the value of HP testing tools for SOA with LISA:
1. LISA works with QualityCenter test management processes. LISA is integrated out-of-the-box with your QualityCenter (or TestDirector) products, and LISA tests can be stored easily as launchable test assets within QualityCenter, directly validating and returning functional, regression, load and performance test results back into QC. This can save many hours spent running manual tests or coding unit tests against the systems under test. LISA's no-code environment makes it easy to author highly reusable tests that can span multiple layers of the architecture, with rich data and visibility feedback for the test managment process.
2. Provides a Virtual Services Environment for QTP and LoadRunner for Functional and Load testing. LISA's Virtual Service Environment (VSE) captures and simulates the behaviors of services as well as underlying message buses, databases and mainframes to decouple your teams from relying upon highly constrained live or incomplete service components. Think about how much time is spent waiting for access to key transaction systems to test against, or waiting for other teams to deliver expected functionality for a testing process. LISA VSE allows your teams to develop and test across the full lifecycle of the SDLC, rather than wait until a near-completed or live application is available. Your LoadRunner test lab can also generate load against the VSE, which supports thousands of transactions per second as a target environment. LISA VSE also saves the huge effort of modeling the complex datasets required for truly testing the variable conditions within your complex architectures.
3. Integrates with Systinet for SOA Governance and Validation. LISA tests interoperate with Systinet Registry/Repository as a key point of Policy Validation for Services and their underlying systems of record. Think about the power of managing Policies in Systinet/S2, and accompanying them with a fully enforceable verification step of a LISA test asset. LISA supports all UDDI standards for working with other business partners' governance strategies as well, and our Continuous Validation Service provides a safety net against the risk of unintended consequences of changes in services, alerting stakeholders if a change will affect service level agreements, or break important workflows, before a new service is promoted for use.
How do I get started testing SOA with my HP/Mercury test lab?
The evaluation process is easy. You will see how LISA validates these important layers within your test process in hours, not days of implementation and customization. Working with iTKO, we can show you how your teams can test at a component and integration level, throughout the lifecycle of your applications.