Optimizing HP Quality Solutions for Complex, Distributed Environments

Enhance your HP LoadRunner performance testing and QualityCenter collaborative processes with ITKO's LISA product suite.

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 complex, highly distributed, multi-tier applications which are becoming so prevalent in IT environments today?

LISA provides a 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 distributed applications across the application lifecycle.

Solving New IT Challenges for HP customers

Enterprise software has evolved into a distributed, multi-tier, service-based delivery model. 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 applications contain many distributed middle-tier technologies and external services, each of which is changing on their own lifecycle. HP customers face several new challenges as a result:

• Incomplete Test Coverage: Traditional testing techniques can test against the UI or a specific technology, but they cannot automate testing across the underlying services, components and middleware-based workflows.
• Unintended Consequences of Change: Individual components and technologies are changing at their own pace, and can create unexpected failures, performance problems, and other issues with downstream systems. Procedural testing approaches are not flexible or reusable enough to keep up with this rate of change - more test automation is needed.
• System dependencies and constraints: System dependencies can severely limit your performance testing, especially in complex, interdependent environments. These dependent components may be poor performing, or simply unavailable. Plus the high costs of test labs, mockups and stubs, combined with contention for shared resources can limit the scope of performance testing, significantly compromising quality and increasing risk.
• Lack of Needed Control for Governance: Governance or service management 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 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

LISA was built from the ground up to test, validate and virtualize all of the middle tiers; from web services, to the message bus, Java servers/ESB platforms, integration suites, POJOs, and legacy objects. Our Virtualization capabilities extend this value beyond the data center by simulating a ready services environment for testing. These results are summarized 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. Virtual Test Environments for QTP and LoadRunner for Functional and Load testing. LISA's virtual test environments capture and simulate 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. For performance testing, HP LoadRunner virtualizes "upstream" users to generate load, while LISA virtualizes "downstream" dependent systems, providing a complete and self-contained virtual test environment. LISA helps reduce risk by rapidly simulating the desired performance conditions of downstream system dependencies, slashes expenses for test labs, delivers test results faster across more scenarios, and maximizes team productivity with 24/7 access for robust load and performance tests.

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 using LISA within 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.

Request an Evaluation with ITKO LISA for HP/Mercury >>