SOA Testing

Helping to realize the full agility benefits of SOA with quality

Today's enterprises are leveraging Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) to provide greater flexibility and agility in meeting business needs. This is enabled by exposing existing IT assets as reusable services and assembling them into composite solutions, with an appropriate governance infrastructure in place. However, SOA's distributed architecture increases interdependencies and the underlying rate of change in the resulting application. This has exposed serious inadequacies with traditional software testing methods, requiring new approaches to maintain SOA application quality and agility in an environment of constant change.

Common SOA testing challenges include:

• No visibility or traceability below the User Interface to isolate errors and problems
• Inability to test "headless" web services and components that do not have an available User Interface
• No ability to continuously validate application functionality, even as underlying components are being changed on their own lifecycles
• Inability to test composite solutions due to limited access or availability of dependent services and data needed for testing
• Inadequate or incomplete testing, resulting in costly problem identification and debugging once released into production
• Poor collaboration between development and QA, with minimal to no reuse of test assets between unit, functional, regression and performance testing

The Solution:

ITKO's LISA product suite can remove these bottlenecks to introduce quality and agility back into SOA. LISA enables complete test automation across all layers of SOA-based applications, including web applications, web services, Java, RIA, Web 2.0, ESB messaging, databases, and many other technologies in a single test solution. Other benefits include:

• Ensure the quality and integrity of your SOA with automated regression, functional and performance testing at build or in a continuous validation mode, which can be scheduled automatically or event triggered.
• Eliminate test resource dependencies without costly custom test harnesses, responders, stubs and the associated development and maintenance. LISA captures, models and simulates the behavior of services and underlying systems, making them available on demand for testing on your terms.
• Improve quality and staff productivity with test case reuse using LISA's point-and-click graphical interface for test creation and maintenance, allowing developers and non-developers to quickly and easily build and elaborate iteratively.

SOA initiatives without appropriate quality practices in place are exposed to tremendous risks from underlying service changes and the sheer number of potential failure points in the architecture. LISA was specifically designed to address the distributed, constantly evolving nature of SOA environments, and helps customers realize the benefits and ROI expected from their SOA initiatives. To find out more about SOA testing solutions that fits your specific needs, please contact iTKO.