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

Has BPM Evolved? Preview of ITKO at Software AG's ProcessWorld Berlin

We'll be heading to Berlin next week to attend Software AG's ProcessWorld 2011 - Europe, and with their recent acquisition of IDS Scheer, this partner is really bringing BPM to the forefront by combining a strong combined product and services offering.

Lately most of our discussions have covered the development, integration and testing infrastructure needed to build software. But we are also being asked, especially by our EMEA customers, has the advance of Service Virtualization and elastic Cloud devtest infrastructure also advanced their ability to successfully execute on a BPM strategy? We think so.

Invoke and Verify is alive and well - and accelerating the delivery of proven BPM processes. This is largely because we are now able to "bridge the gaps" of waiting for human and machine responses, and decrease our dependence on manual verification of results.

Using Service Virtualization, a BPM team can set up automatic, continuous validation processes, with Virtual Services providing the underlying models of dependent mainframes, test data, transaction processes, and user response scenarios needed to ensure process integrity. Non-technical business experts should not only design processes, they should be empowered to self-verify them as well, and that's what LISA's Pathfinder capabilities are all about - one-click reporting and tracing of issue through the infrastructure, so your process guys can get all the details to developers for much higher acceptance and resolution rates.

In light of the need for continuous BPM validation - at ProcessWorld, ITKO's LISA Product Manager Chris Kraus will be presenting a session Wednesday, June 1st - 2:15PM titled:

"Continuous Development, Integration & Test with Virtual Service Environments"

What youll learn: As today’s enterprise applications include more composite elements such as SOA, BPM and Cloud-based services, IT teams struggle to deliver needed software functionality against rapidly increasing complexity and change.  The new technology of Service Virtualization, which captures and simulates the behavior, data and performance characteristics of unavailable or incomplete systems for unconstrained use in development and testing lifecycles, relieves these issues when applied with the right methodology.

Four key capabilities your organization should look for in a Service Virtualization approach can enable extended software dev & test teams to get high quality Software AG-powered applications to market faster, with dramatically lower cost and risk. This session will cover:

• How to provide software dev & test teams with a more Live-like environment  
• Parallel development and testing strategies
• Virtualizing Test Data for out-of-scope systems
• Performance Testing against Virtual Labs

Customer examples of faster software delivery with lower cost and risk will be presented from three leading Software AG-based IT shops in Financial Services, Telecommunications and Retail industries. Come see iTKO in Booth #1 - we're a proud Platinum sponsor of this critical BPM, SOA and integration summit.

 

 

Just Landed from #IBMImpact 2011 - Agility is Smart Business

We're back and settled in after an exhilarating flight through IBM's Impact 2011 show in Las Vegas -- and not just because the casino pumps extra oxygen into the room. This year's Impact theme for IBM was "Changing the Way Business and IT Leaders Work." That covers a lot of ground, but so did the solutions on display this year, for instance IBM's acquisition of Sterling Commerce to bring new industrial processes to bear, not to mention new SOA, integration, Cloud releases...

iTKO's theme for Impact 2011 was "Open the Throttle for Agile Composite Application Development," and to commemorate it, we trucked an actual helicopter onto the show floor. Naturally, when you have an R22 dominating your booth, and people playing helo sim games, it makes a lot of people come by and ask "why the helicopter?" iTKO's founder and Chief Geek John Michelsen answers this and other questions in his on-site interview - watch it on the IBMImpact channel here.

Think about it - you wouldn't assemble or add parts to a helicopter without simulating that those changes would fly in the real world. And you wouldn't step into the cockpit without logging some simulator hours. There's just too much risk. The same applies to enterprise applications. With so much at stake, the ONLY way to be agile and rapidly deliver new functionality safely is simulation. This is exactly what LISA does with Service Virtualization for complex apps that IBM customers rely upon. By virtualizing away dependencies, data and performance constraints, teams can develop and test in parallel, at much lower cost, without impacting live systems.

All in all, I have to say this is the best show we've been involved with so far. The quality of the content, discussions and caliber of attendees was high. For us, the highlight of the show was our Customer Session on Wednesday: "Application Virtualization and End-to-End Quality without Constraints at Leading Banks and Telcos with iTKO." A special thanks to the LISA customers who came and stood up to talk about results they experienced - you blew away our expectations. We'll cover some of these results in a future post. But for now, here's a few more photos from the show.

 

 

 

iTKO Opens the Throttle for Agile App Dev at IBM IMPACT 2011 - Platinum Sponsor

Today’s enterprise software environments change rapidly, and you need the speed and agility to react and respond with new features at a breakneck pace. At this year's IBM IMPACT 2011, April 10-15 in Las Vegas, iTKO is a proud Platinum Sponsor of this huge IBM WebSphere integration, development and IT management conference (more than 5000 to attend).

Our theme for this conference is "Open the Throttle for Agile Composite Application Development," and we will be highlighting several ways that iTKO's LISA platform helps enterprises accelerate the delivery of high-performance composite applications backed by IBM's WebSphere, Datapower, MQ, Rational and Cloud-based solutions.

Hear iTKO's "Chief Geek" and founder John Michelsen at these IMPACT 2011 sessions:

• Tues, April 12: 01:30 PM - 02:45 PM - Venetian - Lando 4201A - Technical Session #2946A:
  “Service Virtualization and DevTest Cloud: Reshaping Application Development”
• Wed. April 13: 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM - Venetian - Lando 4201A - Customer Session #2954A: “Application Virtualization and End-to-End Quality without Constraints at Leading Banks and Telcos” (with special customer guests)
  

We're also hosting two "Birds of a Feather" lunches - bring your ideas and questions for the discussion:

• Tue, April 12: 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM - Venetian - Marcello 4403  Birds of a Feather Lunch #2956A:
  “Cloud-Based Development, Testing and Lab Virtualization”
• Wed, April 13: 12:00 PM - 01:00 PM - Venetian - Lando 4301B    Birds of a Feather Lunch #2955A
  “WebSphere SOA and BPM Testing, Validation and Lab Infrastructure”

Join iTKO at IMPACT, and find out how LISA solutions let your IBM SOA, BPM, and Cloud-based applications get to market on time, with drastically reduced cost and effort. If you haven't signed up yet, you can do so here.

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.

New Whitepaper with Infosys & iTKO: "Driving Better Business Process IT w/ Modern Software Quality"

We just collaborated with Infosys on the first of a series of papers, offering a great introduction to the methodologies needed to successfully pull off a long-term QA initiative across multiple teams in today's complex, distributed software environments.

You can download the new paper for free here: Whitepaper with Infosys and iTKO: Driving Better Business Process IT with Modern Software Quality

As we've talked about frequently in our blog, modern software is being comprised of smaller, more interconnected components or services, which makes testing and development environment costs skyrocket. Add to that complexity all of the individual teams, stakeholders and testers that must support the application, and you know there is a need for better methodology as well as tooling.

(And hey, this paper also looks great - kudos to Infosys' marketing designer...)

Here's the abstract:

To remain competitive, today's enterprise must be able to rapidly support new business processes with an increasingly heterogeneous, changing environment of IT systems. How does a business manager validate this new paradigm, when the old QA approaches do not mitigate the risk of failure? What methodology, systems and tools can we use for coping with the challenges of providing quality in today's agile business environments? How do you know that your CXO's business vision is matched by the quality of systems you invest in?

This new whitepaper, jointly written by Infosys' Gaurish Hattangadi and iTKO's Rajeev Gupta, will provide an overview of the tools and techniques for end-to-end testing, continuous validation and constraint-free Virtualization of today's distributed applications.

If you happen to read this one, let us know what you think! http://www.itko.com/resources/drivingbetter.jsp

How Soon are BPM and SOA Merging?

I just joined in another fast forum on eBizQ with a good question posed by uber-SOA blogger Joe McKendrick:

"There has always been a huge cultural divide between the business folks, who felt that they own BPM, versus the IT folks, who own the architecture or the technology architecture, which would be SOA. So do you think BPM and SOA are going to merge, and if so, how soon?"

Judging by the rapid-fire responses alone, I can tell this strikes a nerve with lots of the experts. I can certainly understand the concern about yet more redefinition and lumping together of terms that aren't really related. However, I don't see this confusion as a problem in practice as much as others might.

In our experience the most successful SOA implementations are being driven at a high level by a BPM process, even if we aren't talking about directly connecting a process engine with a SOA registry for instance. It isn't going to happen overnight, but the SOA implementations without business process orientation will die out and be replaced by business-process driven SOA, which the business can justify budgetary considerations for.

Anyway, yet another good conversation and I invite you to take a look.

SOA's Practical Entry Points

SOA continues to move forward, and judging by the headcount at the latest IBM Impact SOA event we attended, it shows no sign of waning in popularity.

Eric Roch recently discussed a TechTarget survey in his post, SOA Survey Points to Practical Approaches. He wrote that the survey results indicate that the top SOA benefits organizations aim for are improved data integration (32%), enable legacy application integration (32%) and integrated disparate department applications (23%). These are very practical approaches to more cost effective data management and IT operations. Integration plays to SOA’s strengths, but also ups the stakes for automated testing, as we have discussed here a bit. You have more heterogeneity, more integration points and more change than ever - and we are far beyond the point where manual or UI testing approaches can succeed. These dependencies are also dynamic, so you need constant validation of business outcomes.  

BPM is the next most common SOA application, with an indication that its use will grow, as 38% of the subjects are planning to use it in the future. The survey also provides another data source to suggest that SOA is not dead as 49% of the respondents said their organization has one or more SOA projects under way. In addition, it is becoming more strategic as 60% characterize their current or future SOA projects as enterprise level as opposed to operating simply at the departmental/divisional level (21%), or single, isolated projects (19%).

We have repeatedly seen SOA used for cost reduction efforts around the integration of distributed systems and improvement of business processes. Eric calls this "SOA blocking and tackling," and says a great deal of it remains to be done. Automated testing and validation provides the means ensure that SOA meets business goals, while virtualization eliminates service constraints in the environment, so testing and validation can continue. 

Role of IT Architects and Architecture in BPM – MWD Survey

MWD advisors is running a survey on their blog (see "Is there room for architects and architecture in BPM?") exploring their audience's views on the role of IT architects and architecture in BPM. We plan to take the survey and encourage others to do this, as we are interested in seeing the results.

We feel that BPM exists as a discipline outside of any particular IT strategy, but as we have often mentioned in this blog, BPM can be a major driver of service-orientation, as well as governance and quality initiatives.

As the MWD blog points out, there is a lot of talk within the BPM technology vendor community about enabling customers to "scale up" their BPM initiatives. So they rightly suggest that IT architect involvement is likely to be a key factor in shaping how that happens in practice.

They have recently built relationship with the not-for-profit International Association of Software Architects (IASA), and asked them if they would help explore this question. This also want broader input, so we encourage you to participate in this survey and look forward to the results.

Sandy Kemsley's "Column 2" Blog - BPM, Enterprise 2.0 and More

Sandy Kemsley is an independent analyst and systems architect, specializing in business process management, Enterprise 2.0, enterprise architecture and business intelligence. She also writes the great blog, Column 2 on “BPM, Enterprise 2.0 and technology trends in business.” In the blog Sandy provides links to stuff she finds interesting and her own summary.

The longer posts include a lot of event commentary. I liked her summary of a recent Gartner webinar covering what to do in your first 100 days as a BP Director. Just like the first 100 days of a presidency, this time period sets the tone for BPM efforts. The Gartner content was sound, but Sandy added that the actions are more likely to take 18 months rather than three. She said that the complete webinar is likely available for replay and Gartner has two BPM conferences coming up: February 23-25 in London, and March 23-25 in San Diego.

There was also a useful case study on BPM at West Bend Insurance. To be able to better compete in the small business market they used BPM with a focus on reducing the quote-to-issue time from days or weeks down to just minutes or hours. The case study webinar was sponsored by a BPM vendor but as Sandy wrote, “the BPM philosophy and agile methods that they used can be used with pretty much any BPM product: that’s more an issue of corporate culture than the specific product, as long as it provide model-driven process development.”

Sandy has been in the IT space for over 20 years including time at IBM. Since 2001, she has been a maintained a consulting practice as a BPM architect, performing engagements for financial services and insurance organizations across North America, and as an analyst working with BPM vendors. She also creates and delivers BPM and related training courses. So if you are looking at some ways to achieve business-driven improvements in IT, take a look (and so will we).

European BPM Related Conferences for 2009

As I have been looking more closely at BPM in Europe, I come across a number of interesting conferences in this space. Here is what I found so far. They are listed in order of appearance. Let me know if I left any good ones out.

Data Governance Conference Europe 2009 will be held in London on 2 – 5 February. Topics include SOA and data governance. There are a number of high profile case studies. It is sponsored by IRM UK, the people who also do The Business Process Management Conference Europe 2009 and Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe 2009.

Gartner Business Process Management Summit will be held in London 23-25 February. The theme is "Thrive, survive, and capitalize."

CeBIT will be held 3-8 March in Hanover, Germany. It is the world's largest and most renowned trade fair for the world of IT and telecommunications. iTKO will be participating in this event with our Germany channel partners Penta-T, as well as participating in the Software AG exposition area.

Service Oriented Architecture Conference 2009 will be held on 12 March in London. It is sponsored by IDC.

2nd International Conference on Business Process and Services Computing will be held on 22-24 March in Leipzig Germany.

Process Excellence Summit will be held in London on 20-23 April. It is sponsored by IQPC. It says that it will “provide you with accurate and forward thinking updates on how an integrated model of Lean, Six Sigma, OPEX and Business Process Management is evolving towards Business Transformation.”

Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe 2009 will be held in London, 8-10 June. “This 10th Annual Enterprise Architecture Conference will evaluate what works best in different business environments, and what doesn’t, through practical case studies and examples from Global 2000 companies and major public services.” It is sponsored by IRM UK.

Gartner SOA & Application Development and Integration Summit will be held in London, 24-25 June. It covers Application Integration and Middleware Software, Data Access Middleware, Service-Oriented Architecture, Web Services.

7th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2009) will be held 7-10 September in Ulm, Germany. The deadline for papers is 14 March.

The Business Process Management Conference Europe 2009 will be held in London 28-30 September. The Call for Papers for this event will be issued in February 2009. It is in the early stage and the site mostly supplies information on last year's conference. It is sponsored by IRM UK, the people who also do Data Governance Conference Europe 2009 and Enterprise Architecture Conference Europe 2009.

EuroSTAR 2009 Conference will be held 30 November to 3 December in Stockholm. This year's conference theme is: "Testing for Real, Testing for Now"

Some European Blogs Related to BPM and SOA

I have been looking across the pond for European bloggers that cover BPM and SOA.  As we've said in a couple previous posts, in many ways, European companies seem to be jumping into SOA with both feet, but that is often a result of years of practice in BPM - BPM-driven SOA. Anyway, here are some interesting blogs I found, and let us know if you have some other favorites we should review.

ARIS BPM Blog has a number of members and a robust European blogger community.  The About section reads, “In line with our motto “We Love BPM”, the official IDS Scheer Weblog regularly provides the international community with information on BPM and related topics, such as EA, SOA, Process Intelligence, Six Sigma and Compliance. The authors are experts from IDS Scheer, non-profit organizations, companies and universities. We invite the BPM community to actively participate by commenting on the posts.”

CIO Magazine UK has several blogs. They include: The Server Room - that helps keep readers up to date with the latest trends in servers and virtualization, and the CIO blog written by the CIO of Newham, a London borough in transition.

Computerworld UK also has a collection of blogs from practitioners, as well as syndicated analyst commentary. Here are some examples of what you can find there:

Computerworld UK: "The final front tier of SOA" – is written by Dharmesh Mistry who has supported financial services organizations with technology and management expertise for over 20 years. Dharmesh is currently the acting CTO of edge IPK, focusing on developing and launching an Open Presentation Platform built on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Computerworld UK: "TechSpectic" is described as “hype busting thoughts from the Editor in Chief of CIO magazine.

Computerworld UK: "Test driven" is written by David Evans, the Director of Methodology at software quality and testing consultancy SQS. The blogs says that “these are the ruminations of a software quality methodologist, and friends.”

Computerworld UK: "Forrester View: Application Development & Programme Management" – “Forrester Research analysts comment on issues critical to application development and programme management professionals.”

Computerworld UK: "Burton Blogs: Executive Advisory" is written to “keep you up to date with the mutually dependent, relationships that IT and the business have with each other and how to make changes that utilise each other's progress.”

Enterprising Architecture: EA Driven BPM is written by Kapil Pant in the IT Toolbox. Kapil is a Sr. Consultant/Practice Manager of BPM in the UK.  The blog is about “aligning your enterprise roadmap or architecture to execution and montoring for overall enterprise agility.”

IT Directions is an eBizQ blog written by Keith Harrison-Broninski. Keith is the CTO of Role Modellers Ltd, whose “company mission is to develop understanding and support of collaborative human work processes across industry, a field that Keith has pioneered with his work on Human Interaction Management.”

The mwd blog (which we are already quite familiar with and read regularly) covers “IT business alignment and related things.”  Macehiter Ward-Dutton is a specialist IT advisory firm which combines industry research and analysis with tailored consulting services, and is focused exclusively on issues surrounding IT-business alignment.”  UK based. The contributors include Nell Macehiter, Nell Ward-Dutton, Angela Ashenden, and Bola Rotibi.

Peter Borner’s Blog – Peter is with the UK division of Microsoft partner Axispoint – they have 3 other blogs.  Peter’s blog covers BPM.

The Process Performance Blog is written by Mark McGregor, a UK consultant. It is part of IT-Director.com. It covers Business Process Management (BPM), Business Transformation and Enterprise Architecture Blog. Here is a sample post. Are you really doing BPM?

Singularity blog covers BPM and brings in relevant pop references to Malcolm Gladwell, James Bond, and Bob Dylan.  Singularity is a provider of Business Process Management (BPM) and workflow solutions.

Sourcingmag.com – blogosphere is a UK blog community with 19 bloggers. You can become a blogger by going to their site. Sourcingmag.com offers practical advice for IT and business process outsourcing.

First comes BPM, then SOA...

Had a chance to catch a good talk on Business Process Management with our partners at Software AG today.

Mike Lees delivered an extended definition of BPM  in their eyes, and this practice is not centered around technology at all - it is really a management discipline involving the non-technical side of the house, and getting them to understand the "3 A's" (Alignment, Automation & Agility). So, BPM excellence is delivered first as process and later reflected in the software infrastructure.

Another interesting aspect of BPM is the idea of Reuse. Just like the underlying technology in SOA, a defined business process is a piece of metadata that you want to optimize and repeat, especially if it is an effective one. It is interesting to see how "behaviors" and "events" in business can be modeled to meet business needs - they are really more IP than the details of the software itself.

Lastly, I found an interesting "helping-hand" portion of the talk that really hits home - if you want SOA to be a success, get BPM to be a facilitator to SOA. Getting the business teams to think in terms of optimizing, integrating and reusing processes, makes it easier for the IT side of the house to architect and manage their SOA around these vertical and horizontal processes. When interactions between groups, decision points and constraints are modeled successfully, it makes the case for technology that can support it.

It is easy when you are working in the technology/terminology bubble to remember that things like "process transparency" and "optimization" are not about debugging and monitoring the performance metrics of software and integration servers - for the business, they are exactly what they mean.

Business and IT Alignment Regains Top Spot for CIO Concerns

The TotalCIO blog highlighted some of the results of the  recent Society for Information Management  survey of top CIOs. IT and business alignment, the Number 1 issue for four of the past 5 years, reclaimed the top spot after dropping to Number 2 last year. The IT talent issues that dominated year ago — attracting IT professionals and retaining IT professionals, both ranked Number 1 last year– slipped: retaining IT pros fell to the 8 spot, attracting talent to No. 4. IT strategic planning, 8th a year ago, is now up in the 3 spot this year, suggesting that hard times call for better planning.

The survey of 291 companies — 350 company executives — was done in June. In the TotalCIO blog post Linda Tucci wrote that, “it would be natural to conclude that economic realities have intruded on the profession.” However they quoted SIM’s Jerry Luftman, author of the survey, who cautioned against reading too much into the changes, noting that in the broad survey “there is no sense the sky is falling.”

It is nice to know that [at the time of this survey...] there is not panic at the CIO level and great to see a stronger concern with IT and business alignment and strategic planning. Of course, given some of the current grim news on financial shakeups and mismanagment, a little panic may intrude on the CIO's prospects, depending on their affiliation. However, this straw poll shows that many are thinking long term, and this should further open the door for better understanding the alignment of business rules with their validation in existing and planned software.

Thanks to Linda for giving us a preview of the result that will be fully released in November at the annual Society for Information Management meeting.

Intermediating ESBs for SOA: The Final Webinar?

OK, sorry to mix metaphors, but it is time to put this can of worms to bed (???). If you've been following this blog you couldn't help but notice the many posts on the apparent ESB vs. SOA controversy. All of this started with an innocent little interview John did for SearchSOA - where the topic of Intermediating multiple ESBs came up. This article created a tornado of posts from some heavy hitters on SOA topics over the last month.

Given all of that, we decided to have our own little webinar on the topic Monday - and we were glad to find dozens of you Chief Architects and senior IT & Dev Managers attending - and asking some great questions about how to rationalize ESBs with their existing technologies, and enable your SOA initiatives going forward.

You can watch an archive of this informal, and informative webinar, with iTKO's John Michelsen, and Chris Kraus here: http://www.itko.com/site/resources/esbwebinar.jsp. Chris demonstrates a little software how-to in the middle of the session for those to like to see the screens.

Hey, are ESBs evil? We don't think so - we've always considered them to be another valuable building block in SOA for many of our customers. The key to success here is making sure you are using ESB platforms, even if they are of different flavors - for doing what they do best in the integration process. An ESB does not make an out-of-the-box SOA. However with good design and architecture principles, and strong validation and Governance, you can mitigate the risks of working with these technologies and bring a lot of your legacy and transactional technologies into the SOA fold with much more ease.

Virtualization of ESB messaging behaviors (and the underlying apps and mainframes they expose) is another way to address these ESB intermediation constraints between teams - say if I'm on the webMethods (SAG) team and need access to the TIBCO team's messaging framework. Or if I'm using Oracle/BEA Aqualogic and need to interact with services exposed through the SAP XI messaging tools. Our counterpart on the other team may want to limit our access to these systems - especially if they are supporting live business requirements. The ability to virtualize away those inter-team dependencies, and have a realistic, stable Virtual ESB earlier in my design/develop/test lifecycles can take away much of the cost and delivery timing constraints inherent in intermediation.

Is this the final time we'll visit this controversy? Maybe not - as long as there is complexity and change in SOA, which is the case for virtually every decent sized enterprise IT shop, there will be a need to rationalize multiple technologies. After all, we have to keep doing business today, despite mergers, compliance changes and new competitive pressures that make us keep bringing in new technologies.

We invite you to sit in on the session and make up your own mind -- and welcome your comments on the content.

Appian Attempts to Move Up the BPM Food Chain

Sandy Kemsley at Column2 recently reported that Appian, one of the "pure-play" BPM tool providers is attempting to move up the food chain by taking on $10million in Venture capital. One of the objectives for this funding is to enhance their Appian Anywhere SaaS BPM platform. They also want to take on the big players in this space like IBM and Oracle so they need more marketing clout.

I was interested to read several things. Their CEO Matt Calkins said that they’re creating a separate Appian SaaS sales force. It includes a sales model that compensates them based on projected 3-year revenues. This makes it easier to compare the on-demand and enterprise sales teams.

More importantly, Sandy reported that “they plan to shift to a SaaS “metabolism” for Appian Anywhere, allowing for frequent code releases in the on-demand platform, while only occasionally freezing that code base for the Enterprise edition. This keeps the two versions in sync, but provides a functionality advantage to the Appian Anywhere customers, who will see the new features earlier.”

I was also pleased to see that Sandy included in her links, one of our posts on BPM testing & validation: How & Why? She said that “often, companies test BPM in a pretty ad hoc manner; this post discusses how to get some discipline into that activity.”  In this post Chris Kraus and I went into a method that companies can better handle the types of changes that BPM providers like Appian bring and keep testing and validation of business processes under control, especially with more frequent code releases that SaaS models like Appian Anywhere offer.   

BPM testing & validation: How & Why?

BPM (Business Process Management) practices are becoming ubiquitous in the enterprise environment, just like SOA as a strategy for assembling the technologies that support business. Quite simply, the goal of any advanced enterprise application team is to get to a point where the business can manage its process, as it is executed in the software they and their customers use every day.

Enterprises are selecting from two options to enable their teams to define and assemble business processes:

1. Working with the BPM frameworks provided by their selected integration or platform vendors. These may include tools from TIBCO, SoftwareAG/webMethods, SAP, Oracle/BEA, Progress, IBM and Microsoft.

2. Using a "pure-play" BPM tool atop their architecture to model processes. There are several solutions in this category, including Appian, BEA Fuego, Cordys, Global360, Lombardi, Metasystem, Pegasystems, Savvion and SOA Software.

In either case, the company is hoping to achieve a high level of reliability in the orchestrated business processes, to instill trust that the intended business outcome will actually happen. This trust requires making the leap into validating not just the logic of the business process, but all of the underlying technologies and components that must support BPM.

We've seen a lot of activity in this space, especially over the past year, as companies move from pure integration to BPM orchestration initiatives. Our recommendations for ensuring quality and reliable outcomes usually revolve around orchestrating BPM testing and validation both from a "top-down" business process view, and a "bottom-up" technology component view.

Let's take a look at a typical business process for an Order Management application and simplify it to three levels. You have the BPM team that is defining the overall process, the Integration team that is assembling workflows that support the process, and the individual delivery teams that are programming or offering Component-level services that are assembled within the workflows (that support the BPM-defined processes).

The component-level teams provide tests that bubble up to the Integration team as they assemble the services into a Workflow that conducts one aspect of the BPM process, for instance a service that pulls in the Product Data into the workflow of "Place Order." Then the Integration team conducts their own tests of "Place Order," which become part of the validation process for broader testing at the BPM level of "Order Acquisition."

"Top Down" view: The guys at the top of the stack who are using BPM tools cannot possibly be expected to understand the issues and interactions that are happening at the Integration and Component levels. But they do need to know when an issue arises in their business process as it changes, and be able to report it to the teams who are responsible for delivering the underlying logic. They need to take the effort to Validate their business processes, and trust that the underlying delivery teams have done so at their own level.

"Bottom Up" view: The key here is to sign up each team for delivering a set of tests as they contribute technology components or Services into the Workflows that are assembled by Integration teams. Integration teams can take those component tests as "test harnesses" that describe what each component should do, and then tie them together as they are doing integration to provide proof that the expected workflow is valid when it is assembled from underlying components.

The key here, no matter what tools you use, is to validate business processes with tests that incorporate all of the validations that were conducted at the contributing integration and technology layers. This is the only way that you can trust that the expected business outcomes will happen, and trace the root cause of an issue at the underlying layers where the actual business logic and transactions occur.

Of course we have written and developed quite a bit around BPM testing & validation in this regard. We invite your comments on the challenges or techniques you have discovered on your own journey toward BPM in today's IT environment.

SOA Business Process Validation

One of the primary goals of SOA is to model applications closer to the way that business processes actually function.

One way to define a business process is through a language called BPEL (Business Process Execution Language, or “Bee-Pill”) that allows us to create models using business-process type terms that would represent the actual system behavior in the backend of IT applications.

From a validation standpoint we try to take a simplistic approach--if we’re not careful--of trying to import these BPEL models as if they are tests of the processes themselves.

The problem with this approach is that it ignores the fact that testing is actually a verification of business or technical outcomes, not a defined procedure. What we have to do is cause the business process to happen – think of that as “Step One” of a business process validating test. But the remaining steps of the validation may have nothing to do with the business process steps as understood by the process model. Once a business process is in motion, you have to validate the expected technical outcomes of the process.

Let’s use an example: If placing an order within a SOA based application occurs by creating an xml document that represents that order and putting it on a message queue —let’s say that is the cause of a particular business process. Of course, the responsibility of that process as modeled in a BPM tool is to take the xml doc that represents the order and create the inventory transactions, create the shipping and order management transactions, update the CRM system and then close out the order or set the order status to some certain processed state.

How would we validate the business and technical outcomes of this process? Well it would start by causing that process to function. Step 1 then is to create that XML document and drop it on the queue. Great. Then what? Well this requires the an understanding of the outcomes, not the steps of the process. But let’s hope they help shed light on this...

We might have to check the system of record to confirm the order was placed. We might have to asynchronously listen on another message queue and interrogate the message payload for proper content to ensure the shipping system is properly instructed. We might have to refresh a web browser to prove that the end-to-end process completed in the acceptable amount of time.

Alas, very little of that is stored in BPEL :(

Then how can the business ever hope to validate thier business process models when the validation sounds like a bunch of bits and bytes? Ah, we have been working on that problem for years and have a elegant solution if I do say so. In another blog I’ll introduce the concepts and resist the urge to make it an iTKO LISA commercial.