Automated Testing for Java, J2EE
If you are developing J2EE applications, you owe your team a look at LISA's extensive capabilities for testing every component of the stack. LISA runs on any client and tests against every major J2EE server in use today, so as you continue to add components, you'll find that LISA stays right there with you.
(Reprinted from the Fall 2004 issue of SYS-CON's IT Solutions Guide)
Test early. Test often. Like flossing, you know it’s a good habit. But if you aren’t conducting automated testing throughout J2EE development, you are exposing your company to a “root canal” problem – a software error that will be both costly and painful to fix.
Quality is the problem
Quality is a proven lever for increased business value in manufacturing, product design and customer service. Despite emerging standards, the software side of business has failed to realize quality. The overall error rate of enterprise development has remained steady, with only 25 percent of implementation projects successfully meeting budget and timeline, to the tune of US$59.6 billion in annual costs, according to industry estimates.
Companies will try to leverage their existing systems alongside emerging technologies for a competitive edge. While J2EE standards and web services improve widespread connectivity among business systems, supporting an ever-growing set of integration points increases the complexity and risk of enterprise development.
Why hasn’t automated testing become a standard?
Manual testing only finds the bugs you are looking for. Developers can discover some code errors, but they are often too close to the process to recognize a failure to meet business requirements. QA teams can test for front-end bugs, but they cannot explain the root cause of the errors they find. And no manual test can uncover the long-term effects of sustained or highly variable use on a system.
Many enterprises have invested huge sums into automated testing solutions. In practice, developers will admit that these solutions often end up as shelfware. This occurs for several reasons:
- Tight timelines cause QA processes to get left out of the requirement and design phases of development
- Developers are still expected to write code, and write test code at the same time
- The testing tools are too complex for business owners and QA teams to use and understand
- Testing reports failures, but doesn’t uncover exactly where the error occurred
- High total cost of ownership (TCO) of per-user, per-component licensing, implementation and training costs limits the number of participants in the testing process
- Existing tools do not provide true automated test coverage of all the components of a complex J2EE environment
Simply mandating quality will not cut it in software development. Executives need to set realistic standards for quality improvement and get buy in from the developers and analysts who must work with the testing solution. Quality should be top priority for every participant in the development process, not just developers.
Make everyone own quality with LISA
LISA, from iTKO, is the first and only comprehensive no-code automated testing solution built from the ground up for J2EE and web services development. LISA offers the tools developers demand, including regression, performance, load, soak, JDBC, server, messaging, middleware and unit testing (with JUnit/Ant support).
LISA uses “inline testing” to rapidly talk to and report results from web apps of many flavors, then connects and directly tests J2EE application servers, EJBs, web services and messaging systems in the same test case.
But the biggest advantage of LISA is that everyone can own quality. Non-technical users can finally participate in the testing process without having to write or understand code. Through an intuitive Java UI (not a Windows-only client), interactive test cases can be created, shared and modified by QA personnel and business managers on the fly, and run on an ad-hoc or scheduled basis.
When the business side can functionally test that the requirements were met at a component level, you get much earlier reporting of issues, so they are resolved faster. Test results are viewed as live performance graphs or archived to provide developers with the root cause of errors down to the most granular code level.
Quality is not a commodity you can buy. It’s an experience that your entire team needs to live. LISA offers deep functionality, high performance and ease of use that you will not find at any price point in the market. But it is priced to allow your entire team to continually test at every phase of development, from requirements to design, development and deployment.
LISA is perfect for enterprise Java
If you are developing business applications on the J2EE (or J2SE) platform, you owe yourself a closer look at LISA. View LISA for J2EE.