I recently had a chance to catch up with Mark W. Hall, an analyst and writer for Compuworld. Mark was especially interested in the concept of bringing development and testing environments into readiness in his blog "On Demand App/Dev? Not yet, but closer."
Mark talked to several vendors that are in application quality related fields, as this can often be an underdeveloped aspect of development. In other words, we are now take an extremely "agile" approach to developing new functionality, and the quality or ability to test all of the components and interconnectedness in an application's environment just hasn't kept up.
Here's an excerpt of Mark's article:
"At iTKO Inc. in Dallas the company's LISA product lets you tests services (in the cloud or in your data center) virtually. Chief Geek John Michelsen says LISA watches how your app interacts with a given service over time, then it creates a virtual instance of the service with all of its behavioral quirks and features that you can test as often as you like. Michelsen claims it is unrealistic for a developer to test against a live service."
[Just as a clarification - I believe we definitely must enable developers to test live services for checking implementation - however I do believe developers and testers cannot get access to the production environment to do so 95% of the time they really need it, especially if it is already handling live customer transactions...]
Mark also asked about hosting these virtual environments in the Cloud, and a resounding YES, we already see Cloud providers and partners offering up Virtual Services capabilities, playing nicely alongside other virtual servers and machines that make up a well-rounded test environment. Look for more from us on this topic soon.
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