This is the third installment of an open-ended series of enterprise quality & virtualization success stories from our field engineers. It covers how a major European Telco company ensured BPM quality with test validation across all application layers.
"This was a classic case of being caught in the middle with moving targets all around," reports Ruston Vickers, iTKO's CTO. The telco needed to be able to validate downstream B2B integration after taking an upstream provisioning request, processing it as the middleman, and passing it on. The problem was that they had no control over the upstream and downstream services. "Handling this validation issue by calling on the real up and downstream processes was not feasible, and mocking them up manually required too much work and left you trying to model and hit simultaneously moving targets," Ruston said. This made it almost impossible to track down the source of many bugs.
Ruston's team solved this mission impossible problem by providing the capability to accurately simulate both ends, the middle, and the entire process in real time. LISA can first act as the upstream requester, launching the process and then it following it through the multiple service layers to completion. This is done through invocation, validation, and where services are designed but not yet built, the addition of Service Virtualization to simulate the needed services to complete validation.
The actual live upstream and downstream services are then no longer required for testing and validation, freeing the middle level services to rapidly test independently, also avoiding any third party transaction costs or data management issues. The result of implementing iTKO LISA's Validate and Virtualize products was transformational for this telco, and included the functional validation of 120 different order types, as well as load testing of TIBCO BusinessWorks processes and database stored procedures.
Higher quality was achieved through near 100% test coverage to validate end-to-end business process outcomes. In addition, there was faster time-to-market by removing system availability constraints and reduced transaction costs. You can read the complete case here. Our next case covers how a global high-tech manufacturer tested and delivered a demanding enterprise e-commerce site under time and budget.
Comments