LISA Features: Virtual Service Environment

LISA Virtual Service Environment (VSE) represents a sea change in services-based design, testing and development, enabling distributed teams to deliver complex, interdependent enteprise applications in an agile, test-driven way. LISA's VSE delivers significant cost and agility benefits, by virtualizing test beds for developers, regression and functional testers, allowing testing and development scenarios to be conducted in parallel, for maximum productivity throughout the software lifecycle.

To reach the goal of collaborative testing of enterprise applications and business processes, many organizations must build and maintain their own test environments, by manually replicating all of the components they need to interact with. Traditional testing tools don't have the functionality needed to thoroughly test these applications on a continuous, collaborative basis, even when many of the services involved in the test are intermittently available. Virtualizing hardware reduces some of the hardware and installation cost, but still requires a high level of services cost and maintenance to keep that test build current, even if it is running on virtualized hardware.

During development of services, developers need modeled service interfaces as place holders to build out their services that must interoperate with others. For example, one development team is building out customer data, while a second team of developers are creating account data. The two teams will rely on each other's services, but they are both being developed at the same time. LISA will allow fast and automatic implementation of model services that each team can rely on.

Some approaches to "mock services" simply dummy back a set response while services are being implemented. These fake interfaces can used during unit testing, allowing initial testing to start during development before the system is complete. However, when developers and testers need more than a place holder for a service, LISA can capture, and then model a service's behavior, so that it responds with context-specific data. During development, virtual services provided by LISA can also return responses with data driven from Excel or JDBC.

Testers utilize virtual services to create virtual test beds that simulate positive and negative responses to test stimuli. The ability to create predictable regression tests provides overall higher quality and faster turnaround of applications - as the other services, and the underlying implementation layers that feed them are not always readily available.

When designing the test harness that surrounds a component under development, the ability to capture and simulate a virtual service environment of the rest of the distributed enterprise software architecture inside LISA can save up to 80% of the labor and licensing cost of provisioning and maintaining a separate test environment.

In addition to virtualizing your own test environment, many times the system under test will make calls to 3rd party systems, and those service requests also need to be validated before a response is sent. LISA can create synthetic transactions against, model, and simulate the 3rd party service as well, which will receive the SOAP request, validate it and then respond with a SOAP fault if the request is deemed invalid or a valid response if it passes.

Typically, all dependent systems must be in place before system-wide business process tests can be done. This is the optimal testing environment, which is often not available for QA processes. LISA will record live service requests and responses, and create a virtual test bed to remove the team's dependency on live, connected systems or fully replicated test beds. LISA's VSE can create a virtual service provider and respond to service requests with previously recorded responses in a highly detailed way, taking the team most of the way toward full testability at a much lower cost and effort.

ITKO Whitepaper: "Enterprise IT Performance Management with LISA Virtual Services Environment" How can we leverage leading Load & Performance testing tools such as Mercury LoadRunner, and Borland SilkPerformer in our test lab, by leveraging Virtualization to give IT a ready test bed at the speed of change in today's business? LISA Virtual Service Environment allows development, testing and performance teams to achieve better service levels, while saving as much as 90% of the cost of replicating each application environment. here >>.

Read all about SOV and Virtual Services in the comprehensive new whitepaper from iTKO: "Service-Oriented Virtualization: New Frontiers in Agility and Quality Beyond Physical Infrastructures". Read the ITKO Whitepaper on Service-Oriented Virtualization here >>.

For more information on Virtual Service Environment features, download the LISA Product Sheet. >>