Agile development is
spreading in the SOA world to rapidly decrease development times, but if testing
is not done properly, you might lose all the efficiency gains through having to conduct a massive
cleanup effort afterwards. Like building bridges, fix it as you go is a much
better approach than fix it later with massive traffic flowing over the
structure. InfoWorld's Eric Knorr writes about this in his recent Modernizing IT article, "How to be agile without
falling on your face."
Eric reports on a
conversation with iTKO’s Derick Townsend. Derick said that companies within an M&A
cyclone -- particularly in times of high volatility like we are seeing today in financial services markets -- are desperate to accelerate application
development projects.
"They get 80 percent through a project, and they
think the end is in sight, but the last 20 percent really stymies them, and
that has to do with the test and delivery part. They're dealing with so much
complexity. Telcos are experiencing this too. The components and underlying
systems are changing constantly underneath," Townsend said.
Eric goes on to write about how iTKO provides what we call Service Virtualization, which is different than traditional hardware virtualization.
Instead, iTKO LISA absorbs the behavior of all relevant components, services and data in an extended IT environment
and simulates them, This capability allows developers to determine how an
application based on those services will behave under various circumstances in
the real world. Developers can become more agile using Virtualization practices to support increases in complexity, without
a corresponding increase in testing and development risks and cost.
Comments