The ITKO Blog: Service Virtualization and Application Lifecycle Optimization - CA Technologies

iTKO Chalk Talk: Event-Driven SOA

How do you ensure successful delivery today's distributed SOA types of applications, when you don't even know exactly how they are structured? Understanding the challenges of an "Event Driven SOA" model means discovering when and how decoupled applications kick off business processes, and how to validate that the business process is complete as messages cross several technologies.

iTKO Chalk Talk: "Event Driven SOA" (2009, YouTube video 5:57)

iTKO LISA founder and Chief Geek John Michelsen describes how Event-Driven SOA came to be a common architectural pattern in today's modern, distributed business applications, and how testing and validation needs to answer the quality challenges inherent in governing these kinds of apps. Example from the Insurance industry discussed.

Look for more educational and interesting video from iTKO soon. We are getting ready to shoot our next season, so if you have deep questions or topics you'd like use to cover, tell us about it at news[at]itko.com.

The Future of Cloud is the Past of SOA: DBTA article

I realize I might take some heat from a few Cloud pundits for comparing admittedly disparate items in this new article in Database Trends & Analysis: "The Future of Cloud Computing is the Recent Past of SOA for the Software Lifecycle".

As the hype around SOA faded into the overall idea of enterprise architecture, and Virtualization became a standard procedure for saving costs, Cloud Computing became the Next Big Thing for IT. (Somewhere, a self-described Cloud Expert is groaning while reading this sentence and getting ready to blast it on Twitter...)

The ability to provision a complete solution, and scale it on a pay-as-you-need basis on Cloud-based systems is very appealing. However, Cloud Computing faces an often unfounded lack of Trust - one that has nothing to do with the viability of well-designed and managed software, whether or not it resides within a company's datacenter.

So now, let's compare it to the recent past of SOA, which is well beyond it's "Wild West" days of a bunch of loosely assembled services that weren't appropriately governed or tested. Even 2 or 3 years ago, we found people asking very similar questions about trusting SOA. Now? It's quietly become a common strategy for integration in the enterprise.

I'm just saying, there will be a day, not so far in the future, when IT collectively wakes up, rubs its eyes and realizes almost everything has become some sort of Cloud Computing, some combination of Public and Private clouds. The concerns we hear today about trusting the Cloud will again fade into trusting applications in general: Are they well-designed and implemented with appropriate security?

And we can move on to worry about the Next Big Thing.

iTKO Chalk Talk: What is Validation vs. Testing?

Welcome back to another issue of iTKO Chalk Talk. This episode focuses on the discipline of Validation of complex, distributed integration environments, with an example specifically from one of our Defense partners.

We've mentioned before that the US Government is leading the way in many aspects of IT governance (or SOA Governance) - of which Validation is a key component. With so many mission critical systems to support, Validation means more than just business continuity, in this sense it can mean saving lives both at home, and for the warfighter abroad.

iTKO Chalk Talk: What Does Validation Mean? (5:15, YouTube video)

Software Validation is unique from testing - it deals with the need for business and service level continuity of systems, as opposed to a testing checkpoint that occurs along a software release cycle. Validation is what we need to do to ensure that our systems, once tested and integrated, stay healthy - even as underlying services and customer usage patterns change.

Our LISA Validate solution works with many of the leading tools for IT Governance and operations monitoring, such as SOA Registry/Repositories, ALM platforms, performance dashboards, what have you. Pick a set of tools that works for your environment. In the end, validation is not really about the software, it is about making the commitment to ensure that critical applications have the continuous attention and quality coverage they deserve.

Safer Computing Environments at iTKO

File under "Day in the Life" - Our good buddy Reid-O just got an office makeover courtesy of some overzealous techies - he should enjoy his new ergonomic, safe computing environment. This is what you get when you are out creating valuable solutions with global partners!

People are Still Testing User Interfaces

So the heyday of UI testing is over as far as enterprise software is concerned, right? In modern apps, the meaningful business logic happens behind the webpage, in the service-to-service integrations that serve up the appropriate dynamic data. Testing the UI is out of fashion.

Well not exactly. While one type of manual UI acceptance testing faltered, we see another kind of UI testing taking its place. As much as it is true that there are an increasing number of connections and activities going on "behind the glass" that must be tested, it never will replace the need for thorough testing of the user experience. Why is this?

Enter RIAs, or Rich Internet Applications. For a while, serious business applications that leveraged the Internet largely treated the web page as a "request interface" - you enter all the information into a form, submit the page, and it makes a request to the web server, which gets the necessary information from the app server after plenty of back-end processing. Due to performance and latency issues, as well as some rather buggy initial "rich UI" approaches over the last 10 years, it was a lot safer to keep the browser-facing functionality rather simple.

Therefore, testing the UI became of diminishing value in web apps. We needed to validate the back-end systems - the messaging queues, business processes and systems of record. A symptom discovered in the UI meant you were very late to the game in testing.

Now the UI is shifting back into balance in the testing world with RIAs. As customers expect easier and ever-richer user experience on the web, development teams (and the community at large) have moved some of the business functionality back into the browser, to allow customers to more interactively make choices. Technologies such as AJAX, Flash/Flex, Java Swing, Silverlight and other tools have replaced some of the buggy and slow web UI tools of the past. REST-style approaches further advanced the architecture of richer functionality in the front-end.

With this change comes a renaissance in the practice of UI testing. As seen here, one RIA screen such as a trading or entertainment portal may look like one web page to the user, but actually represent hundreds or thousands of separate requests to different servers that populate that page with content. A mere user click or mouse-over on the screen can again, represent several calls from the browser for dynamic data to be displayed. And unlike the late 90's, these customers are not going to wait a few seconds to see results. Lagging performance, displayed glitches and inaccuracies will send the user elsewhere in a heartbeat.

• It takes both human insight: "What is a good user experience and is that what I'm seeing as I test?" AND;
• A whole lot of automation: "How can a tester possibly automate the tests I've already done, while remembering to cover all of the dynamic permutations of content that could be displayed in this RIA screen?"

We've been doing a lot of research in this area, and we've posted some new material on LISA Solutions for RIA and Web 2.0 User Interfaces on itko.com, if you are interested in this topic. Customers are bringing UI testing into harmony with service-based testing and validation approaches.

iTKO Chalk Talk - Test Data Management

Here's a new feature of the iTKO Blog we hope you enjoy - a series of educational "Chalk Talk" short videos covering topics like Software Quality, SOA Governance, BPM Validation, Testing, Cloud Computing and more. This first one features our founder and Chief Geek, John Michelsen. He has a way of pushing a marker that really makes gritty enterprise software topics seem very approachable, so here's his first installment on the challenges of Test Data Management:

One topic that has been on the tip of most of our discussions and recent posts these days is that of virtualization as a solution for Test Data Management (or, "vDTM" as I like to call it...). This form of vTDM is important because it allows your test and development teams to virtually manage test data outside of the system of record.

We hope you find our new Chalk Talks engaging and informative, and look for more video from iTKO soon. If you have any topics you'd like us to cover in the future, send us a note at info@itko.com.