Testing Versata Platform Apps with iTKO LISA
iTKO and Versata (now part of Trilogy, Inc.) have strategically partnered to offer testing solutions and services to Versata customers. As a Versata customer, you have prioritized the rapid development and deployment of business applications. Versata delivers a platform that accelerates the delivery of applications, accounting for complex business rules and today's development standards. But making these applications meet your critical business requirements takes more than the right technology. It takes a commitment to quality at a business level.
No serious enterprise application is an island. In today's deployments, success requires the integration of multiple components. As a Versata customer, you will need to know how well all of your connected systems can scale and sustain over time to meet the needs of your customers. Software quality cannot be an afterthought.
iTKO LISA 4 Complete SOA Test Suite offers an ideal testing companion to building applications with Versata solutions. LISA is used by Versata to test and support its own software, and Versata software has also been made testable in unique ways by end customers using LISA.
Versata applications are services-oriented
Versata applications are delivered as sets of business services or components that your company can assemble to build composite applications: dynamic, web-enabled applications that leverage multiple back-end layers of technology. Thanks to the nature of Versata's toolset, much of the structural work and support responsibility for component-level quality is already taken care of for the customer by product engineering teams and testers.
When you build a business application with Versata, their J2EE framework produces 90% of the code you need by eliminating the task of coding and assembling many common components. However, when you create any application, even with a powerful framework automating much of the effort, you will need to test every layer of your application, to ensure that it successfully meets your business requirements, as it will be deployed in the real world.
Fortunately Versata and iTKO have partnered to specifically answer these kinds of questions. LISA software is a testing engine of choice, both within the Versata organization and at customer sites. This is accomplished by two methods: Versata software is tested with LISA during internal development. And Versata software has been test enabled for customer teams who choose to test with LISA.
Closing the loop on enterprise software quality
Since LISA test cases do not require coding, and are built in a point-and-click fashion, they can be built and executed rapidly and early in development cycles. Both developers and non-programming QA and business teams use LISA, within Versata and at end customer sites. And since LISA test cases can exercise business logic in a declarative way, they survive much longer against a complex dynamic application, meaning the functional and unit tests can be reused later as regression tests and load tests, for a much more significant time and cost savings while ensuring that quality levels continue to grow. This "closed loop testing" ability has long been the holy grail of enterprise software testing.
This ease of test creation and reuse LISA creates can save the IT department up to 80% of the labor expense of these formerly manual testing processes.
The more complex your application, the more compelling LISA becomes.
LISA provides an ideal automated testing functionality for Versata applications and enterprise Java. Further, LISA boasts the most comprehensive and easy to use test extensibility model in the market. By utilizing an innovative "inline testing" approach, LISA can discover, analyze and talk directly to every layer of a composite application, from EJBs and web services, to databases and messaging.
Since many aspects of Versata applications are already testable or made "test enabled" for LISA, customers reduce the overall cost of finding and fixing errors by providing insight into the root cause, or exact conditions in which an error occurred. This establishes a compelling ROI for software quality investments.
Start testing earlier.
Gaining the ability to point-and-click test the functionality of Versata services as they will work together when deployed offers a huge benefit in finished quality and efficiency. LISA tests maintain the context of a business workflow, even when every component is not yet completed or in place.
"In many Versata implementations, we find the front-end is either highly modified or custom-built," says John Michelsen, iTKO's chief scientist. "It's very frustrating from a quality perspective to build a business service with all this functionality, and then have to wait 3 months while the UI guys build an interface before you get the opportunity to test the business logic."
For Versata customers that are upgrading and/or standardizing on web services architectures, the value of testing with LISA becomes self-evident. Ask your Versata representative for an online demonstration. For more information on LISA, read more about LISA at http://www.itko.com.