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

What's the Best First Use of Cloud? iTKO on eBizQ Podcast.

Over the course of this year we have had an increasing number of customers who have made a commitment to "go cloud" as a strategy to realize flexible, on-demand computing capacity and IT cost savings in a broad sense. You would assume that we would also see some huge success stories in Cloud, but they are still waiting to be seen.

I just did a Podcast with eBizQ's forum editor Peter Schooff called "What's the Best First Use of the Cloud?" to discuss where companies could start their Cloud efforts to realize the maximum benefit for the minimum outlay, specifically in the software development & test area. http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/2010/09/whats_the_best_first_use_of_th.php

What stymies Cloud? It's not the negative hucksters who make unfounded complaints about the lack of Security or Performance in Cloud. An application that is poorly secured and tuned will be a problem whether or not it is deployed in cloud. No, we are finding the biggest issues to real cloud development are the elements of Cloud that are still external to your control or scope.

Don't just "stick your apps in the Cloud." Make your apps, integrate them, test them and tune them in a DevTest Cloud, where all of the external dependencies, data and configuration are ready anytime.

2nd Paper in Infosys & iTKO Series: Service Virtualization for Modern Applications

I just got back from a select QA Leadership workshop in Palo Alto hosted by our partners at Infosys, where I presented perhaps one of the world's shortest talks for one of the world's most complicated tasks: Optimizing the entire application lifecycle in 30 minutes or less!

Obviously I could only scratch the surface, but there's something to be said for the focus that comes out of brevity, and it led to great questions and discussion with joint customers and Infosys leaders like Aparna Sharma (whom I've presented webinars with before) - people who have overcome some of the biggest challenges in software testing.

Certainly a major focus of my talk and an ensuing discussion was the practice of Service Virtualization - the simulation of systems and services that are either constrained or unavailable for use in testing and development throughout the software lifecycle. Service Virtualization is key to eliminating dependencies and allowing multiple teams to work around their constraints and conduct their activities in parallel.

It was a great day -- and on that topic of virtualization, we also have the release of the final version of this brief paper we co-authored with Infosys for the second of a series of articles about best practices for IT, Dev and QA initiatives for modern, service-based applications.

You can download the new paper for free here: Whitepaper with Infosys and iTKO: Service Virtualization for Modern Applications

Here's the abstract: Disruptive innovations such as the internet have repeatedly forced businesses to change quickly or be relegated to history. Every such disruption asks a simple question of service functions in an organization - can they evolve quickly enough? Modern approaches such as service oriented architectures (SOA), along with other similar distributed application architectures, carry great promise and can provide an effective model for lean, agile and componentized IT that can adapt quickly. SOA is one of the most widely adopted enterprise architectural methodologies, but its implementation is anything but simple. Since classical testing methodologies and tools do not fit modern applications well, we have evolved newer more rigorous approaches and products to address increased software complexity and change. Service Virtualization is one of the latest ideas that can provide a faster time to market for software, with higher quality and lesser risk.

This new whitepaper, jointly written by Infosys' Gaurish Hattangadi and iTKO's Rajeev Gupta, focuses on the use of virtualization of constraints as it applies to the problems of developing and testing modern SOA applications. Let us know what you think as you explore virtualizing services in your own software lifecycle. http://www.itko.com/resources/servicevirtualizationmodernapps.jsp.

2010 - The year we met DevTest Clouds...

Today we released a new version of the whitepaper: "The DevTest Cloud: An Essential Platform for Application Development" -- and aside from looking really good (kudos to the designers), it contains a whole lot of new thinking about how we should best bring enterprise software development into the Cloud age.

If your enterprise has a Cloud initiative brewing, there is not a higher value lever to pull right now than optimizing development and testing activities in the Cloud. You should find out what DevTest Cloud platforms can do to bring the elasticity of Cloud to the software lifecycle: on-demand dev & test environments, with ready capacity at exponentially lower costs.

This is just a start, as we believe 2010 will be the year of the emergence of DevTest Cloud platforms. Leading vendors such as IBM, VMware, Citrix, Amazon and others are delivering elastic, on-demand infrastructures that are more than just places to host applications. We'll continue demonstrating how enterprises will be able to build their own DevTest Cloud platform that leverages these solutions.

Look for more blogs from us on this vital practice, as well as new videos, new press and articles, customer stories, and an appearance from John at the upcoming Cloud Computing Expo 2010.

You can get a copy of this paper, and find all the latest DevTest Cloud resources from iTKO here: http://itko.com/cloud.

Development vs. QA Video: "It Works on My Machine!"

Here at iTKO we know better than anyone that software development and testing is not all fun and games. But it can be pretty funny when you look at this dialogue between our little avatars Cass (QA) and Eric (Developer) - a back-and-forth that we've lived and seen played out in IT departments and software development shops around the world. See anything familiar here?

We find in most enterprise software shops, as many as 60% of bugs reported by QA are not accepted or rejected by Development as invalid or "not repeatable." An amazing amount of time is wasted on issue acceptance and defect resolution processes. This is exactly why we came up with LISA Pathfinder, which allows any tester to immediately capture and report an issue with just one "alt-click."

QA teams need to focus on testing functionality, not attempting to make the case to development whether or not a bug actually exists. And Developers need the full transparency of a complete stack trace - not just what the tester saw on the screen, but every single thing happening behind the browser, and repeated in the exact state that reported error condition occurred. We hope you like the video and maybe see a parallel in your own organization!

SearchSOA Editor's Notebook: DevTest Clouds

A little while ago our CEO Shridhar Mittal, and IBM's Cloud executive Walter Falk had a chance to catch up with SearchSOA (TechTarget) editor Jack Vaughan. Jack wrote about our conversation on development & testing in the Cloud in his Reporter's Notebook:

Reporter's Notebook: "Push and Pull in Software Development"

Our discussion focused on how development & testing groups are addressing the increased costs and complexity of today’s distributed applications, by trying to move quality left in the lifecycle. However, there is an exponential increase in the amount of dependencies in the software lifecycle -– systems that are unavailable, costly to access, or simply not finished yet for development purposes.

This is where what IBM calls "Application Virtualization" comes in, with development and testing representing the most valid use cases for building applications in the cloud. This offering (see the post on the joint IBM/iTKO AV offering from May, and the IBM Rational news from June) paired LISA's form of Service Virtualization of unavailable or constrained 3rd party services and systems, with a full suite of ALM development and testing solutions, and best practices from IBM's services and technology groups.

Dev & Test are the most obvious places for larger enterprises to start moving to Cloud. With so many existing systems and multiple teams involved in integrating new software functionality, the virtualization of constraints as a "DevTest Cloud" is the key to productivity in the organization.

The question here is not "Where do I host this to save some costs or have additional system capacity?" That is important, but in this instance we are first asking: "Where is your software being built, and how efficiently is that delivery process meeting customer needs?"

This solution can be offered on an IBM Cloud, or other leading cloud infrastructure providers, but replacing some hardware is not the primary significance. It does not matter where the DevTest cloud resides: Public, private or a “personal” cloud on the user’s desktop, what’s important in our view, is that it provides an unconstrained platform, with dependencies resolved for successfully developing, testing and delivering applications that are ready for a service-oriented, or Cloud-based future.

Bringing Virtual Efficiency to Utilities - On IBM developerWorks Cloud Zone

The Utility and Energy industry is one space where "Green IT" is really creating "Green" end results in terms of customer usage and efficiencies. We have had utility customers for years solving software integration problems at the service- and message bus level, better validating and testing customer provisioning and billing apps. So that makes for some traditional software efficiencies.

 But what are some of today's more unique challenges where we can apply the entire concept of Service Virtualization - to remove resource costs and constraints - and make the software development lifecycle "Greener" by creating efficiencies at the very source of our power?

Article in IBM developerWorks Cloud Zone:
Service virtualization and validation practices for the utility industry 
Eliminating software constraints and mitigating IT risk to modernize energy delivery

I recently worked with LISA product manager/EMEA solutions director Chris Kraus on this interesting article - out today, that covers this for IBM's DeveloperWorks community of more than 4 million IT professionals. Thanks Aimee and the team at DW for the editorial help - we hope it offers some useful advice on how Service Virtualization, when applied to Utility IT problems, takes on a very real quality.

For one thing, think about Advanced Metering Systems (AMS), and the enabling software that sits atop a new Smart Grid architecture. We are literally seeing millions of new devices being added to the grid, every month. Across the global energy industry, there is a push to optimize energy infrastructure both at a network and customer level. Governments have mandated efficiency initiatives that are funded both by customer billing and subsidy ($3.4 Billion in government grant funds for Smart Grid projects in US, $21.4 Billion allocated worldwide in 2009).

Another cool area? Take a look at what's going on in Europe right now - but instead of smart meters, it's smart cars. Electric fuel points for electric cars have a similar value prop to smart metering - and pilots are going on in Germany, Netherlands and France. To get there, they not only need to set up the plug-in fuel stations, they need to anticipate the demands of a moving and growing customer base for electric fuel, and the metering and billing complexities that go with it.