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

Case Study - Test, Integrate and Virtualize Environments at Oracle

When the world's largest enterprise software company makes a commitment to "shift quality left" - and make consistent improvements in time-to-market, labor and infrastructure costs, and delivered quality across product lines, that equates to a case study worth reading.

• Read the iTKO LISA Case Study: Oracle Testing & Validation here.

This year we've been working with Oracle to automate and remove constraints from aspects of their own software lifecycle, and I recently had a chance to interview two of the leads on our projects there.

First, Oracle AIA (Application Integration Architecture) group's Nand Shivkumar described how they were able to Virtualize the company's integration labs, and offer their business-specific process integrations as Virtual Services for other performance and test teams to use for their own parallel development without delays or conflicts over access.

We also talked with the Oracle Fusion ADF (Application Development Framework) quality lead Amitabh Nandan about how they are conducting complex testing, then automating those as test suites that validate their advanced Web 2.0 style interfaces and frameworks for building customer apps.

For a software company that has grown with extensive product development as well as through strategic acquisition of leading product suites, the ability to rapidly integrate and deploy apps depends on having ready lab environments, as well as highly automated testing that can peel the layers of their architecture from the rich UI to the middle tier. Hope you enjoy the story and your feedback is appreciated.

News from IBM on Development & Testing in the Cloud

Good news came out today from our partners at IBM that highlights many of the initial customer successes we're seeing for the discipline of moving software development and test processes to the Cloud - what we at iTKO refer to as DevTest Cloud.

The solution offering, called IBM's Smart Business Development and Test Cloud, encompasses several technologies and services from IBM and its partners. iTKO's LISA Virtualize technology is a critical catalyst of the solution, as LISA's Virtual Service Environments (VSEs) enable the virtualization of constrained systems and performance labs needed to make the Cloud a truly elastic, 24/7 ready resource for parallel dev & test.

You may remember two major announcements this year we've discussed on this blog - iTKO's role in IBM's Application Virtualization strategy, and our integration of LISA as a Ready for Rational solution enabling end-to-end testing and virtualization.

Key features listed in today's release "IBM Expand Cloud Offerings for Software Development & Testing" included:

• IBM Testing Services for Cloud - application virtualization: Clients rapidly create multiple virtual test environments customized for each development and testing team.  By providing testing teams with 24/7 availability without dependencies on back-end systems and data stores, the service gives testing teams the ability to test more thoroughly throughout the life cycle without worrying about data or service availability. A North American company using this service experienced a 22 percent reduction in the Function and System Test cycle and a 100 percent return in ROI within 90 days.
• IBM Testing Services for Cloud – performance testing: Brings together automation and performance testing tools to significantly reduce time by as much as 50 percent, the service provides flexible, utility-based testing that delivers on-demand performance testing, and offers robust, large-scale performance testing services to enterprises, via Cloud hosting.  This service identifies defects earlier in the cycle where they are less expensive to fix and eliminates performance-related bottlenecks.

How do customers start capturing the value above, and start utilizing Cloud Development & Test solutions like this today?  We recently wrote this case study with a major Telco customer that was an early adopter of our joint vision of VSEs and Application Virtualization in the Cloud, and they have certainly seen even more returned value over the last 6 months.

Now Hiring at iTKO - Job Update

This is just a quick update of some available job postings at iTKO - we are continuing to grow to meet customer needs. If you know someone who is truly motivated and exceptional, and looking for an exciting career path at a company on the cutting edge, refer them to us. Here's the available positions right now:

• Senior Technical Writer 
• Technical Writer
• Senior Quality Engineer
• Solution Architect - Presales
• Professional Services - Consulting
• Senior Support Engineer

If one of the roles above is a fit, candidates can email their resume/CV to jobs [at] itko.com. No third party referrals, vendors or recruiting firms, please.

Seeing the BPM Process is Believing

I recently commented on this eBizQ forum on "What is the single greatest benefit of BPM?" here:

"The biggest benefit to me is the simplistic view: that BPM represents the process that actually gets executed, in a visual model that the business can actually understand.

The "dirty little secret" of integration heretofore was that while we made neat little whiteboard sketches or UML diagrams, the business process itself would be implemented and coded behind the scenes by technicians in a way that probably didn't resemble the process at all.

The inability of business stakeholders to be involved in real process design - because it used to be an exclusively technical endeavor - is exactly what created disconnects between requirements and delivery. So in my opinion, the visual model of an executable business process itself is the most important benefit of BPM."

This got me thinking further about how both the business expert and the software dev/test organization should get a literal big-picture view of any analogous technical activity, rather than work from two different blueprints or interfaces.

Why was a computer with a mouse better, when at the time an expert user could certainly work much faster using keyboard shortcuts? Why is a multi-touch phone better, when discrete keys clearly require less dexterity and produce fewer input mistakes? Sometimes the long-term capabilities of a more interactive UI supercede any immediate productivity hit.

Thinking of testing or development activities in a BPM view will involve some tradeoffs in efficiency over specialized interfaces, but may net better results as delivery will be much closer to requirements. In the long term, new methods for collaboration can arise from the presence of a shared visual interface as well.

We've certainly taken this to heart in thinking through shared aspects of test and dev interactivity and making our LISA Pathfinder product have a more collaborative, process-oriented UI. While both testers and coders need to drill down into specialized tools, there is something to be said for a common view that all teams can use to speed up interaction as service-based software and cloud applications become more complex and interconnected.

News Today: LISA Across the Software Lifecycle at Australia and New Zealand Bank

Today's press release represents a very significant customer announcement in a very important geography for iTKO. Several leading institutions in Australia & New Zealand are selecting LISA for virtualisation (proper English spelling, of course) of their software development and testing environments, as well as end-to-end testing and validation activities.

We are particularly excited to announce this new deployment at ANZ Bank via today's press release:

iTKO LISA Software deployed in Asia Pacific
Australia and New Zealand Banking Group selects iTKO’s LISA Testing, Validation and Virtualisation Solutions

Here's an excerpt from the release: “After an evaluation process that considered our existing technologies and future IT objectives, we ultimately decided that iTKO’s complete LISA Suite would reduce risk, cycle times and costs across our development and testing cycles,” said ANZ Head of Testing, Environments & Change CoE, Technology Global Solution Delivery, Marcello Martino. “We believe that LISA will allow us to automate more activities, improve our use of existing infrastructure, enhance collaboration, and help us to better meet our customer needs.”

This bank is representative of modernization going on in technology groups in the entire APAC region. ANZ is making huge leaps in modernizing their SDLC lab environments, and collaborating with delivery partners, through virtual services, validation and governance technologies. We think this is only the start of advances we'll see coming from down under as adoption of Cloud-based dev & test practices accelerates.

Related coverage on this news:

• Computerworld.au: ANZ picks up in-house testing platform
• ITWire: Westpac and ANZ float cloud testing
• Global Services: ANZ Picks Up In-house testing platform
• Finextra: ANZ and Westpac tap the cloud for testing
• MIS Asia (Ovum perspective): Calling retail banks: boarding on your flight to the cloud has now commenced

The World Finally Seems to Get the DevTest Cloud Idea

We're going to continue this week with more interesting things we've heard customers and partners say about best practices for employing DevTest Cloud practices to solve big, hairy software problems.

Last week we were at STARWEST 2010 in San Diego, and the attendance was about double last year's draw. More than 250 QA professionals stopped by, and many of the managers said "I was specifically asked to find out how to virtualize my test lab" or "We are looking for a way to take our SDLC to the Cloud" or "I know we are moving to a federated Cloud solution for our defense projects and we need to be involved" - referring to the government's Forge.Mil initiative we discussed here recently.

Heady stuff, because in previous years most of the questions at these shows were about testing specific protocols and interfaces such as web services, web 2.0 UIs or TIBCO, etc.

From our bizdev man Scott - he made one call to a potential customer, and he was already thinking DevTest Cloud. Check out an excerpt of what this guy sent out to his team, telling them all to get familiar with the concept -- before he'd even finished the first page of our recent whitepaper about virtualization in the DevTest Cloud:

If you glance at the executive summary of their white paper, they seem to address the issue of the various independent systems required to make up a test/development environment. From my high level discussion, I learned that they do this via simulation rather than reproduction of the external system. Having a solution to simulate external dependencies would be of great benefit for repeatable tests and to quickly reproduce a whole environment. I think it is very interesting.

All of the aspects that make Cloud enticing - elasticity, on-demand resources, provisioning as a "utility," multi-tenancy and low-cost capacity, make DevTest Cloud especially interesting, because it truly allows teams to work in parallel, while avoiding the constraints of huge costs and delays created by waiting for unavailable or live system dependencies to be available in their environments.

We too find it very encouraging that when enterprise IT thinks Cloud, they are starting to also think of software Development and Test as an essential function of the Cloud, rather than merely Cloud Computing as a deployment option.

 

Drafting with ease behind Virtual Service Environments

We often get the question: If we are using a Virtual Service Environment, instead of the live environment, are we still effectively testing the system? 

When some people first hear about replacing constrained systems, mainframes, incomplete and under-development services and the like with Virtual Services, their first reaction is immediately: "That's not a real performance / load / regression test bed then."

I was at a meeting in Europe last week -- and chalk it up to perspective but one of our partner's engineering counterparts used a really effective analogy for how LISA VSE works.

Picture a car. When you want to test a car's aerodynamics, you can't get in it and start driving around and expect any degree of certainty in your results. So you put the car in a wind tunnel, and then do the testing. So when you simulate the wind hitting the car, you are certainly still testing the car, but you have the ability to turn the wind up and down and do the testing with more control.

I really liked the simple message and hope it helps you understand the concept of how a virtual service environment can actually work better and provide a better range of performance results than the expense and effort of always having to replicate or use "the real thing."

The same concept also applies for a stable set of test data to do your regression testing - the external data around your system under test is configurable and controllable, so if there's a problem, it is your app failing, not the test scenario becoming invalid due to unexpected changes in the data.