LISA Editions: LISA Load & Performance Testing (LISA LPT)
Powerful and flexible load and performance test management at the heart of your enterprise.
Using highly reusable tests, LISA Load & Performance Testing directly exercises individual components, business processes, and system-wide SOA workflows from design, through deployment. Individual functional component tests and system-wide business processes are load tested using the same environment, resulting in efficient test coverage, with rich functional and performance metrics and reports.
The Challenges of Load Testing SOA applications
Load testing has evolved from a post-deployment exercise, to a vital step in the agile SOA development process. Since service-based applications entail constant change and increased complexity under the covers, waiting to stress test a finished application at the user interface level is no longer a viable option.
Previous load testing solutions were built around a paradigm of client/server applications, and not the composite (service-oriented) architectures today's enterprise needs to test. These earlier load testing solutions simulated load by exercising the points and clicks on an actual Windows client GUI, leaving the interpretation of results up to the tester's scripting ability - an approach that loses context against virtually any dynamic application.
Benefits of LISA Load & Performance Testing
- High performance, low system overhead. Produce real condition load with incredible efficiency. If you're looking at buying a âtest farmâ of servers, reduce that cost of entry with the lean instruction set of LISA virtual users. LISA Server can also take advantage of available processor time on a network of computers if you need more load without more hardware.
- Supports continuous development & integration lifecycles. LISA LPT leverages the same LISA test cases your team created for unit, functional and regression testing, and turns them into load and stress tests that can run continuously, for a huge testing productivity, and test coverage ROI boost that grows over time.
- Advanced Metrics Visibility and Alerting. Identify performance bottlenecks with advanced metrics (JMX, SNMP, LISA metrics and Windows Perfmon). Have LISA send SNMP alerts to you or your applications if any boundary, threshold or failure conditions are encountered during a test run. Application Lifecycle Process Support. Share LISA test cases, individual load test runs and complete results down to the transaction level if you wish - as simple XML files - and incorporate them into your groupware, issue tracking, test managment and requirements management processes.
How LISA Load & Performance Testing Works
A LISA LPT installation is comprised of three modules, which are configured for the test scheduling and load testing capacity according to the needs of your business:
- LISA Server: The âchassisâ for running all staged testing types. Maintains a test registry of regression and functional tests that can be run on an ad-hoc basis. Provides no metrics on its own, but great when you need to stage your tests from a build.
- LISA Coordinator: Schedules and stages the test at any defined interval, and routes one or more virtual users and test cases to the systems under test.
- LISA Simulators (Virtual Users): Licensed pool of virtual users that your team applies to simulate LISA test cases against multiple systems and collect complete metrics and transaction data. Each Simulator reports complete data back to the LISA Server, where progress can be monitored in real time or consolidated into reports.
- LISA Continuous Validation Service (CVS): By leveraging LISA CVS. you gain the ability to orchestrate LISA tests and test suites continuously at Build and Runtime, ensuring business continuity across multiple organizations and evolving services.
LISA LPT is easy to invoke from any LISA client, or even from a command line. All you need to do is take your LISA unit, regression and/or functional test cases, and tell LPT to run them as often as you like, against every component layer your test touches, with no additional incremental costs per test run or technology type tested. Finally, a load and performance testing solution that your team has the freedom and incentive to use continuously.
Since LISA offers direct functional and performance validation of every component of SOA applications, with or without a UI present, load testing is no longer limited to the client interface, or the number of instances of Windows computers running on a given network. LISA load tests also leverage the end-to-end functional tests created in LISA, invoking and verifying at every tier of the architecture, with a very low system footprint required, so capacity can be simulated at the lowest possible effort and cost.
For more information on LISA Server for Load and Performance features, download the LISA Product Sheet. >>