LISA Solutions for Microsoft .NET
Testing, Validation and Virtualization for .NET Enterprise Application Environments
Teams are creating increasingly complex distributed applications using .NET while seeking to maximize flexibility and keep development costs down. Yet significant opportunities remain for increasing quality and avoiding bottlenecks in the .NET software delivery lifecycle.
Challenges
Microsoft .NET allows developers to rapidly create software using a composite application approach leveraging underlying services, data sources and existing components. However with this increase in flexibility comes a corresponding increase in complexity and rate of change such that conventional testing and hardware virtualization approaches fail to keep up.
- Limited tools for system-wide quality. Most approaches to testing .NET-based applications tend to favor the familiar paradigm of Windows GUI testing tools. While "acceptance testing" from a user perspective is useful, waiting for a completed UI to test means testing is delayed until pre-production or production, when the rest of the application and infrastructure is already integrated. This not only creates risk, it exposes software errors when they are costliest to fix.
- Bottlenecks due to incomplete or unavailable components. As companies break development groups into smaller, distributed "agile" teams, serious new constraints emerge in the form of systems that are unavailable for testing and development. Hardware virtualization fails to adequately address this challenge, as some systems and 3rd party services do not lend themselves to hardware virtualization, or the cost and complexity becomes prohibited.
LISA Benefits for .NET Architectures
LISA provides automated quality assurance for distributed, heterogeneous .NET environments, allowing teams to directly test, validate and virtualize these environments without coding or writing a test UI client. The benefits are described below as the "4 C's":
- Complete. LISA provides broad .NET technology coverage including rich browser UI elements, web services, and SQL databases within a single test. LISA also tests the many diverse and heterogeneous components integrated in .NET environments today, with rapid extensibility for custom and proprietary software.
- Collaborative. LISA provides value across the .NET software lifecycle and integrates easily to your process tools of choice with an intuitive no-code testing environment that QA and development teams can quickly learn and share.
- Continuous. LISA continually validates end-to-end scenarios against .NET based service architectures to ensure that expected functional and performance policies are met. This validation reduces the risk of "unintended consequences" when new services are introduced or components are changed.
- Constraint-Free. LISA Virtualize can model and simulate the behavior of highly constrained, costly or unavailable live services, databases, third party applications, and other IT resources, eliminating dependencies and increasing agility for testers and developers at drastically lower cost.
Key Features
- Leading-edge RIA or "Web 2.0" testing allows teams to declaratively test dynamic websites, including functionality such as ActiveX, AJAX and most other browser-based application technologies.
- Point-and-click .NET WCF compliant web services testing and WSDL/SOAP analysis and interaction. Include testing of front-end web interfaces, web services, and validation of systems of record and databases (SQL server or any JDBC source) in a single test case.
- Leverage suites of existing nUnit services, launch LISA from command-line or batch scripts, roll those same unit and functional tests into regression tests included in nAnt/Make builds, and leverage the same test cases for load and performance testing.
- Since LISA test cases and results are saved as XML files, they can easily be incorporated into test processes, issue tracking, and requirements management tools such as HP Quality Center and Visual Studio test management.
LISA's broad technology coverage, extensibility and ability to virtualize key test and delivery constraints ensures that .NET teams can operate at maximum productivity, delivering high software quality levels with lower cost and less risk.
To learn more about how LISA incorporates the 4 C's and can address critical development constraints and software reliability challenges in your organization, please contact us, or read more about LISA Virtualize, LISA Validate, LISA Test, and LISA Pathfinder.