The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

Fast, Cheap & Good? Virtually Breaking the Limits of Software Development

We had a well-attended ITKO webinar with analyst firm voke on Lifecycle Virtualization (see an archive here) with almost 200 live attendees yesterday - clearly a lot of interest in these new developments, and thanks to all who attended.

In the first half, voke's Theresa Lanowitz described her research on Lifecycle Virtualization (LV) as an emerging technology space that encompasses several major vendors and niche players in Service Virtualization, virtual lab management (VLM), cloud platforms, network and device virtualization. She predicts an LV market will come to fruition and demonstrate value for IT by 2013 -- not so far off for something so new. But then again, remember how recently Cloud was a new concept?

As everyone knows by now, you can't simply cost-cut your way to differentiation and leadership in these competitive times. Hardware and desktop virtualization made a big one-time impact on IT costs by reducing the number of Intel boxes, but now what? Is there opportunity for another field of Virtualization that could be focused around meeting customer needs?

For most industries today, your ability to successfully deliver software is your ability to deliver business value for customers. Or, as Theresa put it more simply: "Software IS the business." Software touches everything, from sales, to manufacturing and delivery, to back end accounting and strategic planning. The ripped-from-the-headlines software failures she mentioned yesterday in banks, telcos, retail are moribund, and making headlines every day.

A couple of the more pointed questions we got during the webinar really made me think about how far we've come since the limits of the Rule of 3 in software development:

"Fast, Good, or Cheap Software:
-- You can't have all 3!"

In fact, simply making strides against this rule was a main goal of ITKO's in the very early days (around 2003-2006) when we were selling quality assurance software for complex architectures like J2EE and SOA. Hey it's not cheap to get skilled programmers and testers for these applications, so do automated component testing earlier, save some time and money and avoid costly project failures. There was just one missing piece though: How could we move this lifecycle forward faster as software became more and more distributed, while not having access or control over so many systems we need?

Service Virtualization is already becoming a proven and essential practice, with solutions from leading vendors -- and it will fundamentally reset the value equation of software development. Call SV part of Lifecycle Virtualization if you like, but it definitely fits the bill of replacing physical and manually copied development infrastructure with automated, virtual infrastructure.

This new virtual environment, whether on-premise or in the Cloud, is flexible enough to allow software development and testing activities to happen in parallel, at much lower cost and extreme efficiency. Yes we can now do Better, Faster, Cheaper - all of which enable the enterprise to deliver software that perfectly meets customer needs.

Thanks for your questions yesterday, and we invite you to recommend yesterday's webinar archive replay now on our site, and download a complimentary licensed copy of voke's latest Market Snapshot overview on Lifecycle Virtualization if you have a colleague who might benefit from this info.

Next up on the ITKO Blog: Who Manages Cloud Chaos??

Emergency Alert Message: Seek a Virtual Environment Immediately!

Did you hear about yesterday's "Government Alert" test message broadcasted to Verizon mobile subscribers in New Jersey and other Eastern US states? The message said:

"CMAS Alert - Civil Emergency in this area until 1:24 PM EST Take Shelter Now U.S. Govern." (story in NJ.com)

Thousands of panicked callers immediately flooded 911 lines wondering what went wrong, and where the "Take Shelter" should happen. State Police and the NJ branch of Department of Homeland Security were on the case. As it turns out, the company apologized later that the message was just a test the carrier was running to verify their participation in the government's CMAS, or Commercial Mobile Alert System.

Events like this are a ringing endorsement for the practice of Service Virtualization - coupled with a solution like LISA that could have been used to simulate the back-end systems, the message relay, or any number of end-user phones receiving the message -- so Verizon could complete their development and test cycles. Outside of the constraints of limited access time to live systems, and the high costs of securing or replicating solid test infrastructure and data, there is a brimming risk factor for end customers.

Testing your software against (or anywhere near) the live system is inherently volatile and risky. One wrong destination address left in the code, one unauthorized data change executed by developers, can generate very troublesome results indeed. The ability to message everyone with an alert only works if we can be assured that the message is real. We hope these teams make the call to decouple themselves from live systems and customers, and immediately start testing them in a virtual service environment.

 

 

 

LISA Customers at CA World'11 - An Excellent Hour of Real Stories and Results

Most of us ITKOers are just back from our very first CA World -- and it couldn't have been a more exciting time, as we see LISA solutions becoming a key part of of the CA family of solutions and optimizing the application lifecycle for a whole new set of customers. Thanks to everyone who visited our booth and attended our fun outdoor reception Monday night.

The pinnacle of the conference, for me at least, was the ITKO Customer Session on Tuesday, where some of our leading customers at HSBC, IBM Global Services, Sprint and SoCal Edison shared their real-world stories and results of implementing LISA to eliminate constraints from their application lifecycles.

Highlights included:

• An estimated 50% faster time to market for new product/functionality delivery across the board - meeting management's critical requirement for more agile innovation.
• As much as 94-99.6% faster system testing cycles. The customer said "I would have reported 100% improvement because of the level of automation, but nobody would have believed me!"
• For 2000+ development and test resources, increased the availability of environments to consistently identify defects 2 phases earlier (40-70% cycle time reduction), and realized ROI within 30 days.

One of the coolest things we've ever seen came up in the last spot - a fun internal education videos SCE's Hector Sotelo showed here during his talk - "I Need An Environment":

 

After the session there were some great questions for the group -- and, not unexpectedly, a healthy degree of skepticism from the audience that Service Virtualization and automation with LISA could yield huge results like saving $12M in infrastructure costs, 50% faster time to delivery and 99%+ faster regression and integration test cycles.

But this session was not ITKO telling the story - it was a real LISA customer panel that has been there, and done that -- and the consensus was that while the software does a lot - is is still people that must make the change. The challenges of realizing optimization in the software lifecycle aren't technical in most cases. The panel explained how they got the buy-in and adoption of not just one development or test team, but IT ops, management, and the line of business that depends on software for its offerings.  Anyway, this was a very compelling session to hear, so expect some more observations about it and plans for more customer sessions in the future. We'll let you know when more videos and material from CA World 2011 become available.

 

 

LISA on the Map at CA World - Optimize IT Change and Operations

Less than a week until CA World 2011 in Vegas Nov. 13-16, and ITKO's first-ever appearance there (as a CA company) is gearing up to have quite a lot to offer attendees of this premier IT event - many of whom may not be familiar with how much ITKO can help IT Operations, Environments and Performance Management teams do their jobs, outside of LISA's better-known role in enterprise software virtualization and development solutions.

Take a look at this little handout map we are bringing - you can hear from ITKO experts at almost every moment of CA World, starting with the Service Assurance General Session on Monday. ITKO engineers, LISA customers and partners will be presenting on best practices for Service Virtualization, continuous testing, building Cloud-based DevTest environments, and more.

Also, check out some more interesting content featuring ITKO with CA Technologies solutions at CAWorld 2011:

1. Sessions featuring CA Service Assurance (Introscope/Wily/NetQoS) and LISA - plays twice: AE007SR: Faster Time-to-Market for Critical Business Services with CA APM and CA LISA – Tuesday, 11/15, 1:15 – 2:15PM, and Wed., 11/16, 2:45 – 3:45, Lagoon H
2. ERwin's Data Modeling and the Application Lifecycle: Monday, 2:45PM. What are the best practices for understanding data dependencies and reduce risk from software design, through development and testing? Features content about ERwin and LISA. CA's Donna Burbank presents.
3. Service Assurance and CA LISA in the Expo: See how to use Service Virtualization for Performance Optimization, and find out about faster Break/Fix capabilities using CA's Application Performance Management and LISA's defect resolution features together.

So - besides catching ITKO's track for optimizing the application lifecycle, look around next week - there are plenty of opportunities to learn new techniques for increasing agility at CA World.

"iqnite 2011" - That's Australian for Agile Development & Cloud Testing Oct 5-6

We're sponsors of an excellent upcoming event in Sydney, Australia this October 5-6 - iqnite, the Software Testing Summit.

We are excited to see many of our new customers present and speaking about using Virtual Service environments to get products to market with higher quality, and eliminating the constraints testers face in getting access to a valid, ready-to-run software lab with far less labor and infrastructure cost.

Our founder and "Chief Geek," John Michelsen will be presenting a session:

Thursday, Oct 6, 2:15PM: "Shifting Quality Left with Agile Collaboration and Cloud DevTest Labs"

To successfully build and release critical new customer-facing services faster, you need to think of Cloud as more than just another hosting option. As companies deploy Dev and Test Clouds, they quickly realize that cloud environments remain intertwined with dependency constraints on other "off cloud" systems in the enterprise. If not addressed, these constraints effectively limit the elasticity, flexibility, and overall usefulness of Dev and Test Cloud environments. This session will discuss how multiple teams can increase their agility and collaborate more effectively by leveraging virtual infrastructure in DevTest clouds. Time to market is accelerated when the lab infrastructure and data scenarios are in place on-demand, enabling you to “shift quality left” and test much earlier in the software lifecycle.

The last 2 years have seen an incredible amount of LISA activity from the Australia/New Zealand IT community, especially in fully embracing the concepts of Service Virtualization and DevTest Cloud for most of the major Banking and Telco enterprises there. It's almost as if the whole continent waited for composite application architecture methods to sort themselves out before adopting service-orientation, then leapfrogged their global IT counterparts by moving straight into doing that distributed development and testing in elastic, on-demand Cloud labs.

Discount Registration Offer: As premium sponsors of this highly anticipated event, we can offer you and your colleagues $300 off a standard two day conference pass, or $100 off a one day conference pass. Be sure to use the promotion code "oziqnitekjross" when booking to secure this special price.

The show has keynotes from Google, Microsoft and Commonwealth Bank. The level of customer experience in solving some of the most difficult QA issues in the Cloud at this show looks great. Bring your questions for us, and hope to see you there!

Ready to Fly at TIBCO TUCON 2011 - Session

We're in the midst of preparing for TIBCO's big annual event, TUCON 2011 - September 27-29 - this year it's in Las Vegas at the Aria Hotel. It's been 3 years since our last appearance at one of these shows.

Our co-founder & Chief Technologist Ruston Vickers will be presenting Wednesday, Sept. 28th at 3:40PM as part of the show's Cloud Track: "ITKO: Make TIBCO Application Development Lifeycles Fly." [See the Cloud Track of sessions here.]

Ruston's session will cover 6 different customer examples - from an investment bank that avoided dangerous software problems by "shifting quality left" and continuously validating their TIBCO RV ESB systems and messaging, to a Telco that is developing and testing complex apps in Cloud environments at a huge cost savings and scalability advantage.

As you might have noticed, ITKO is now a CA Technologies company, and our theme for this show is "Where Agility Takes Flight." Fundamentally, our LISA products help TIBCO customers deliver critical IT functionality to market faster, cheaper, and with better quality.

You won't be able to miss our booth -- so if you hover around there, ask us how the union of LISA and CA product suites will help your TIBCO integration and Cloud projects get off the ground faster, and improve coverage across the lifecycle of applications, beyond LISA's innovative development, test, Service Virtualization and DevTest Cloud environments that TIBCO and its customers are already familiar with.

We're looking forward to this show. TUCON puts the customers first, and provides great insight into the latest practices happening in integration environments and partners swirling around this company. You can register for the event here: http://tucon.tibco.com/ and tell 'em we sent you!

Helping a Telco Run Faster with Service Virtualization

Just got a really great note from one of our lead consultants in the field at a top US Telco provider. One of their major business groups that handles premium mobile content such as  search, games and entertainment, needed to go live with a new customer-facing system.

The highlights? Deployment had zero defects at launch and resulted in more than $3 million in software cost savings for 2011, while saving 4-5 weeks of expected cycle time.

The company had a driving reason to virtualize services, as they had a multi-million dollar upgrade planned for their delivery platform, and with it, a wash of additional licensing and maintenance expenditures.  Many of these costs would be "non value add" services and labor - duplicate licenses, time spent replicating over application servers and customer databases, all to provide an environment for them to use in pre-production to develop and test each new app against.

To top it off, the timeframe was extremely limited - the need for the above implementation was identified in March and the system was due in June this year! The app dev team chose to head off this requirement by implementing Service Virtualization models using LISA. If they failed, they would have been up the proverbial creek without an environment.

Fortunately, they were able to install and implement all of the needed virtual services and launch the new environment in less than 4 months - quite a difference from a process they had never before completed in less than a year. Then, the presence of completed, 24/7 available virtual labs allowed the development team to "shift quality left" and start collaborating immediately and shave 4-5 weeks off their expected customer services release timeline.

Anyway, we love hearing about teams that put Service Virtualization on the line to realize efficiencies and improved quality like this. Kudos!

Webinar w/ Infosys 6/15: Solving the Hardest DevTest Challenges with Service Virtualization

We're looking forward to our third major webinar with Infosys, in which we wrap up our joint series of events on accelerating testing and collaboration for now -- with one covering the best practices of Service Virtualization.

Many of the world's leading companies trust their delivery and testing business to Infosys, and therefore they are particularly qualified to know about how to achieve higher levels of efficiency across large, geographically distributed services teams, through eliminating constraints and isolating the right conditions for validating that functionality gets delivered as expected.

Webinar with Infosys and ITKO June 15^th, 1:00PM CDT:
"Solving the Toughest Development and Testing Problems with Service Virtualization"

Join Infosys' Aparna Sharma and iTKO's John Michelsen for this Service Virtualization best practices and technology review webinar. This session for ITKO and Infosys customers and subscribers, will cover:

• How to break down silos that exist in complex business processes to enable end to end business process testing
• Parallel development and testing strategies
• How to provide software dev & test teams with a more production-like environment with Service Virtualization, and
• Performance and Regression Testing against Virtual Labs

Hope you can join us for this compelling online event - it's your best chance to hear from two thought leaders in software delivery. Bring your questions!

Video: Measuring Success in Customer Dev & Test Labs

Here's a new video commercial you'll see running in some of our upcoming channels about customer value. Obviously, there are a huge array of "test productivity" metrics like cost per test, cycle time per regression or peformance test suite that we continue to measure. However, with new capabilities of LISA like Service Virtualization, DCM and Pathfinder that have no direct equivalents out there in the market, proving customer value becomes paramount.

 

At iTKO we have a Business Value Assessment methodology to revisit customers at different points after adoption, and measure value delivered to date.

A big part of companies realizing value actually has little to do with our product, and everything to do with how aggressive the company is about scaling their efforts and defining a strategy to achieve the full potential value. This is why we have built out a very strong strategic Services arm and partner ecosystem - as the technology won't matter if the people involved don't adopt it with the appropriate methodology and commitment.

Often successully accelerating timelines or decreasing costs takes a change in mindset. For instance, if the company's IT leadership only thinks about Agile as something developers do while coding, and Testing as a point-in-time activity after deployment, they will have difficulties. The entire software lifecycle needs to be Agile -- and Testing isn't just for UAT, it's part of development, performance tuning, integration, every phase of that lifecycle. Sticking to the definitions of the past can be costly.

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.

Cool Field Story 3: Self-Service Virtualization

Here's another great story Ken and I gathered after a recent successful deployment. Technology is always rushing forward with more customizable development and test lab solutions for every enterprise.  Even at iTKO we continue to extend leading-edge product functionality for all the unique scenarios that customers bring forward.

Much of the time this type of customization is focused on making automated testing or performance testing more efficient.  But in reality, there are still tens of thousands of manual testers out there, and save for some slight process improvement, they have been largely ignored over the years when it comes to automating their complete environment.

An iTKO telco customer recently showed some examples of how they enabled their manual testers to be much more efficient through the use of Service Virtualization.  After sending transactions through their Front-End CRM UI, they log into their Back-End UI which shows them the detail of the Virtual Services captured behind their System Under Test.  This Back-End UI is something they developed on top of LISA Virtualize, and it exposes the current data inside LISA, such as the status of various Customer Orders, previously executed transactions, etc.

That’s mildly interesting, so testers can at least see if the transactions are properly reaching the Back-End.  However, what’s really clever is that they let the manual testers go in and modify the Back-End Virtual Service directly.  Testers can automatically skip a number of steps to put an order into the completion phase (which would typically take a very long time to enter in the Front-End UI), or they can setup negative scenarios such as an invalid order, error condition, etc.

This lets users decide in real-time exactly how they want the system to behave.  They are able to test a larger number of scenarios simply by being able to create conditions that the test lab normally does not allow.  And manual testers are empowered to setup their own scenarios without involving the DBAs and higher-level Test Data Management architects.  So by being able to quickly “prepare” the virtual environment for a specific test, they do not have to spend so much time setting and resetting test data.

Fortunately for them this has come with a number of positive results as well:

• Functional coverage after the first project stands at 80%, and they plan to reach 90% by the next release.
• Testers are 40-50% more efficient without needing access to specific test data, or getting a DBA to setup a specific scenario
• Testing across the board has started earlier in the software lifecycle, and they are finding defects much earlier in the SDLC
• Oh, and on top of all that they’re already saving over $200K annually, simply by not sending transactions to validate their system against the third-party vendor's test lab system (which was seldom working reliably and had unstable data anyway).

We hope you find these real-world stories useful in thinking about how to improve your own dev and test processes. Let us know what you think, and if there are any software challenges you would like us to cover in future articles!

Cool Field Story 2: From Production Issue to Resolution Virtually Overnight

Here's another great story from the field from iTKO lead solution strategist Ken Ahrens. (You may remember the paper he wrote with me on "Virtualizing Over-Utilized Systems" a few months ago).

When all else (literally) fails... try simulating from Production

One of our banking customers recently told us a success story about how they used Virtualize to solve an issue related to a production outage.  We were pretty surprised because LISA is primarily used for dev and test in the SDLC, and not typically in Operations and Production.  But they said for certain that their production defect was solved because they were able to use Virtualize to recreate the problem scenario.

However, Virtual Services was not their first approach.  When the Operations people identified that customers were experiencing a performance-related issue, they immediately contacted the Production Support team.  After collecting information about the issue they triaged to find that customer problems were due to a performance related issue happening in the middleware. 

Next, they immediately tried to recreate the problem by generating load in their test lab, but they found that they could not reproduce it there.  The test lab's version of the mainframe could not support the transaction load, so the back-end capacity was never high enough to recreate the problem in the middleware.  At this point, several developers and testers had spent more than a week trying to reproduce the issue, and they still didn’t know exactly what was causing the problem.

They reached out to the bank's performance team (who are avid LISA virtualization experts) to ask for assistance in running the stress tests.  The load team mentioned that for very high volume load tests, they used Virtual Services to simulate the back-ends, which had significantly higher capacity than the legacy mainframe system in the lab.  That way, there was no bottleneck behind the middleware under test.

The only problem was that the data was already set up in the live systems, and the Virtual Services used different data.  Typically this is the kind of problem that can take days to fix with DBAs manually copying records from one system to another and using conventional TDM (test data management) methods to ready all of the data for a test.  Indeed in this case, this effort had already taken place once. So instead of copying all that data to a new system, one of the Performance team engineers looked at their sample responses from Production and used LISA to automatically generate a thousand responses in a handful of Virtual Services in a couple of hours.

Immediately, they were able to generate the proper load on the middleware system, using the Virtual Service backend to eliminate the bottleneck.  They found they were quickly able to recreate the problem and identify the proper fix.  The typical resolution for this type of problem went from being measured in weeks to simply days (over a weekend, actually) through the use of Virtual Services.

The moral? When all else (literally) fails, support problem isolation and resolution with Virtual Services instead of trying to replicate what you don't need. It's predictable, scalable -- and just works!

 

 

Cool Story from the Field: Virtual Training Environments - Nothing to do with Dev & Test

I was recently talking to a banking customer who started using Service Virtualization to do something that is more than a novel use: setting up Training environments for thousands of tellers and customer service reps (CSRs). When you think about the enormous level of investment and time involved in recruiting and training skilled CSRs to handle customer transactions, it becomes quite clear this is not a novelty.

There is a large amount of turnover in any CSR division - these employees have to be good at what they do, but they will also likely move on to other positions within the enterprise, or go elsewhere to do a similar job. Whether you are talking about banking and financial traders, travel agents, product support, cable television, or any system requiring a lot of personal attention, the company sinks millions of dollars into building education labs and getting all those reps up to speed on every key scenario they must support.

The training system for a customer-driven enterprise must be as sophisticated as the actual live systems, if you are going to train these people to do the job right. Or at least it should LOOK as sophisticated. Simply screen-scraping a system with rote answers is usually not enough realism to teach a complex interactive task. You need the underlying data to support the task you are training for. For instance, if a check deposited after 3:00PM needs to be shown as clearing the next morning, that's precisely how the system should respond to the trainee.

This is where Service Virtualization comes in. Using LISA to capture thousands of transactions between the CSR terminals and the underlying customer databases, transaction systems and mainframes (this could also be done from system logs), a Virtual Training Environment (VTE) is created, which behaves and responds almost exactly like the real thing. Part of the VTE is a Test Data Management component, where things like customer account numbers are "sanitized" to protect private customer data, while still being formatted in a realistic way for training purposes.

Best of all, once these VTEs are created, they can be reset again with the appropriate scenarios almost instantaneously for each student, with no waiting for manual configuration, no new infrastructure setup and costs, and no impact on the live back-end systems. If you are looking for a little more detail on this project, you can read LISA Case Study: Virtual Training Environments at an Interstate Banking Firm here.

While Virtual Services are becoming the go-to solution for eliminating constraints from software dev & test labs, this is not the only time we've seen them used in a completely non-software-development context, and we love seeing innovation in how customers apply the technology. Stay tuned for more Cool Stories from the Field over the next 3 weeks.

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 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.

 

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.

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.

New Analyst Product Report: LISA 5.0 Technical Audit - Ovum

Useful news out today about some available research -- iTKO recently participated in an independent product review of our latest LISA version 5 Suite with UK-based analyst firm Ovum (formerly Butler Group) principal analyst Rob Hailstone, The research was not sponsored by iTKO, however we have purchased rights to the report so you can download it free for a limited time at http://itko.com/ovum.

In the report, Hailstone provides this overall assessment of LISA's market:

"LISA Suite provides a comprehensive set of testing capabilities that will allow customers to improve the effectiveness of their QA function for SOA or other component-based development environments. The functional modules can be enabled individually to satisfy point-solution testing requirements, but make most sense when deployed together as an integrated suite.

LISA Suite is targeted at large organizations serious about the use of SOA, but limited deployments at the department level provide a common entry level. Organizations deploying applications into a public or private cloud will benefit from the end-to-end visibility and root-cause analysis provided. LISA Suite is less appropriate for smaller organizations or those using SOA technology for simple integration."

For many years, LISA was often considered by market analysts only as a "SOA Testing" tool, which is a useful definition, but not necessarily one that represents the scope of many of today's development and performance challenges for teams dealing with complex, distributed architectures. This document points out it's also not just about SOA, as many enterprises are more concerned with BPM, Virtualization and Cloud, which are not tied to a specific architectural style or approach.

Why did we license the report? Well, after a comprehensive functionality comparison and walkthrough process, we think the report Rob produced provides a pithy overview of LISA 5 software. You can download your own copy and decide for yourself...

News Today: Enabling the Defense Community in the Cloud with LISA Virtual Dev & Testing

Today iTKO issues a press release about our support for Forge.Mil, a collaborative software environment for the U.S. Department of Defense. As many of you know we have been following the dedicated work of DISA (DoD’s IT arm), and LISA-enabling their leading partners (such as Harris, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, and many others) over the last 5 years, as a part of certifying and test services that are contributing to deliver functionality to the warfighter.

Here's the official press release out today:

Optimized Software Virtualization, Test and Validation in the Cloud for U.S. Department of Defense

DISA's Forge.Mil Initiative to Offer Shared TestForge Services in the Cloud, Enabling Faster Delivery of Capabilities to the Warfighter Through Software Release Efficiencies

Most discussion of Cloud to date is focused on either the infrastructure itself (the actual servers and running VMs, or IaaS - Infrastructure as as Service), or the applications themselves that are hosted on Cloud (for instance a SaaS-based offering). But how do we successfully deliver today's complex applications, when all the dependencies and constraints of unavailable systems drag teams down? Nowhere would this challenge be more evident than in Defense, where the work of many distributed teams must go on, while at the same time critical live systems must be secured against the volatility of testing and development.

Forge.Mil contains a Cloud-based community called TestForge - with a built-in Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Virtual Service Environments, so all development and test contributors can have 24/7 availability without impacting live systems, and create new levels of efficiency. The Forge.Mil initiative (which includes TestForge, SourceForge as well as providing a cloud platform for other aspects of software lifecycle management) proves that in many aspects of IT governance and innovation, federal agencies continue to lead the way over the private sector. Optimizing software in this sense can not only save time and money, but lives in the field. Thanks to everyone who has helped drive this vision.

Those Guys need LISA!

I frequently joke with my team about finding our next customers in major business publications. Every time I read a headline like the following, I immediately think: “Those guys need LISA!"

Yahoo Tech News: "Apple, AT&T sites buckle as iPhone 4 pre-orders begin"

The fact is, all the agile developers, functional testers and load testing servers they can fire up are not going to help them here.  This is NOT a load testing issue, it’s a virtualization of services issue!

If we met the guys working on all this critical stuff, you would certainly not hear that companies like Apple or AT&T don’t have enough money to buy servers.  In fact, many major companies actually tell me that they have more servers registered in their asset tracking system than they have employees!  These guys will be no different...

So how could these teams have used LISA to prevent this conundrum?

1. Service Virtualize each others' pieces of functionality that contribute to the site experience, so that each team can develop and functionally test their bits, without having to wait for the system to come together later, during integration.
2. Service Virtualize the dependent systems (inventory, customer ordering, account and number provisioning, etc.) so that performance tests at high levels can be performed ahead of time, and each service can size and qualify their environment for the load expected when it goes live.

Some day in the future, they will even want to have intelligent ways to fail over in production during peak load hours, but let's not put the cart before the horse. One of my banking customers puts it eloquently when he tells his component teams to reach a certain performance level on their own: "If your app isn't performing fast enough in your own virtual environment, why should you bother giving it to me to test in my environment?"

OK I’ll stop rambling.  Now somebody let me know when the coast is clear, so I can order my next phone ...  ;)

Insurance Case Study: Managing a Virtual Performance Budget

We just published a new case study from a leading Insurance (Property & Casualty) provider, which we think neatly outlines the advantages of using Service Virtualization to help manage performance of a complex, multi-tier application.

In this example, the company basically breaks apart an application-wide Performance Test into all of the steps that make it up, and assigns a target time for each step that makes up that application workflow. The decomposed target time for each step makes up a "Performance Budget" that contributes to the overall performance time.

Without decomposing the performance budget, you get no visibility into which element of the application is causing the hit on response time - you only know the End-to-End response time is not up to snuff (4.0 seconds here vs. expected 2.1 second response time for customers).

Given that, the first impulse of the performance tester is often throwing more hardware at the test lab, trying to get that speed up. This may help a little but it usually misses the mark in pinpointing the real time hog underneath the surface.

This is where we apply Service Virtualization - to virtualize the Behaviors of each of the component services in the end-to-end workflow. Behaviors in this sense are not functional, but they are the realistic response times of each component when subjected to load. By virtualizing the components around your component under test, you can figure out which one needs tuning, and which ones aren't creating performance problems in the overall application. We think this customer employed the practice, with the assistance of our LISA Virtualize product, with a high level of success.

This topic was covered for starters in a paper I worked on with Ken Ahrens called "Virtualizing Over-Utilized Systems" and a series of blog posts on the topic last year. Look for a next installment on virtualizing performance testing from us this year - I hope we can cover some new ground for you "application speed freaks" out there.

The discipline of Performance Testing is sometimes also called Non-Functional Testing (or NFT), but the lines for NFT are blurry when you are also performance testing with the realistic use cases and variable data required to get a true snapshot of real-world performance levels.

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.

Field Stories - Managing Through the Logistics of Change

Here's a new customer story we just completed about working with a leading Europe logistics company on integration and performance testing throughout a comprehensive change process. This large transportation vendor handles both sea and land operations for passengers and freight, and handles a very high volume of traffic through its management and reservation systems.

This situation represents a complete replacement of the custom systems the company cobbled together over the last 20+ years with a completely new solution set, using some of the best-of-breed logistics and TM software packages on the market, along with integration software from Software AG (webMethods) and some Oracle systems of record. In order to get there, this company built a new team to allow a "competency center" around integration, to match the investments it was making in a newer, more scalable platform.

Obviously, with so many critical operations on the line, the integration center immediately identified performance testing as a primary task. They already had individuals attempting to verify response times by testing UI elements such as passenger and ferry reservation websites, with little success, so they turned to the back-end elements, where the harder business process calculations need to be made.

By directly invoking the message broker, integration framework and the system of record behind the browser, they were able to deliver a system that has so far run without critical failures in its first seven months of operations. At the same time by automating the execution of regression and performance test runs, they avoided needing to hire several more testers - estimating a reduction of 33% or more of the testing cost.

You can download the complete story here: http://www.itko.com/resources/europelogics.jsp.

Monsters of SOA Webinar 3/31: Reducing SOA Costs with QA

We're looking forward to what I am informally dubbing a "Monsters of SOA" online discussion and presentation titled "Realizing the Benefits of Enterprise Integration and SOA at Lower Costs" coming up on IDevNews March 31, 1pm Eastern with iTKOs Chief Geek & Founder, John Michelsen (left), and Perficient's Chief Technologist Eric Roch (right). iDevNews' editor Vance McCarthy will moderate.

We've had the pleasure of collaborating with Eric's consulting teams on  the ground at  several large-scale SOA migration and implementation customer sites, and we have found there are many points when our best advice and tools for testing and validation merge with Perficient's best practices and delivery process - so much so that they have developed a specialized QA program for SOA - which according to real project timelines can consume up to 30% of a typical SOA initiative's budget.

The fact is, the more services-based functionality you add, and the more agility you introduce, the faster your rate of change is. And we aren't throwing anything away by adding SOA, so that means more you need to test, and more demand for stronger validation throughout the project lifecycle.

Don't get me wrong of course, agility and the distributed approaches that enable it are great things - and QA and validation are great things, but while we deliver that, we need to deliver it in more automated, smarter ways so it drives agility and cost reduction instead of expanding in cost with the complexity of the architecture.

Eric also puts out a SOA blog we frequently read on Toolbox. In this talk we have two IT leaders with hundreds of SOA-style project engagement experiences between them, so stick around for the insights and Q&A.

Anyway, hope you can tune in March 31 or afterward to watch the session archive, signup is free here: https://secure.soatube.com/registration/w_iTKO2/?code=itko. A preview copy of the slides can also be downloaded.

Field Reports on SOA Success - Part Six: Major Enterprise Software Firm

In life, there are some good surprises (birthdays, hearing a great new song, meeting that special someone), but in enterprise software, not so much. This sixth example in our stories from the field is about a major enterprise software firm.

This firm decided to move much of the sales of their software upgrades and maintenance contracts to a web portal, where clients could just buy and download the updates they needed. Previously the sales force would not have to get involved with contacting each client and conducting manual orders on routine stuff, which wasted time for both parties. Many clients had open POs so they could just add on these incremental purchases. This was to be a win for both sides.

To set this up, they needed to access the customer data and their software inventory. They could then make suggestions about what additions might be needed, offer the ability to instantly purchase, and download. They did manual testing of the system UI, and thorough unit testing of the software. Everything seemed okay for rollout.

However, as they discovered three months after the launch, there was a problem with the all-important middle step. The system was supposed to push the order into the enterprise invoicing system, SAP in this case. Then the client would be billed.

Ninety days after launch, the guy responsible for the SAP transaction system asked if they had started this new system since no orders had entered into the system of record. To their embarrassment, the clients were getting their software downloads, but their invoices were not getting recorded.

It seems another group implemented a policy so that each account had a password change every 90 days. These changes occurred between the application test time and the launch time. So fulfilled upgrade orders were getting logged as bad data, and then flushed on a regular basis. The clients were not complaining because they were getting the software, and likely did not mind that the invoicing appeared slow.

The firm brought us in to do end-to-end business process testing to make sure that all steps in the process worked on sample cases. We tested not just at the web ordering UI layer, but followed that transaction through the app server, ESBs, CORBA and all the way to confirming that it made it into the system of record. We call this practice “invoke and verify.”

After software was downloaded, LISA made sure the invoice was processed for that specific download, and the team quickly rooted out the “changed password” culprit that was causing orders to get routed incorrectly from within the ESB layer. This validation was also done on a continuous basis to make sure any new changes did not disrupt the flow. Now all steps in the process work, and the original goals of better customer service at lower cost -- without the unwelcome surprises -- were achieved.

You can find the complete case details here.

Field Reports on SOA Success - Part Five: Major Airlines

We’ve talked a lot about how ensuring quality is a big challenge for complex SOA and enterprise software environments. But there is a bigger-picture risk that can drive any project past deadline and over budget: constrained and costly access to necessary systems and data throughout the development and testing lifecycle. This fifth example is about a major airline.

Like many companies, they faced constraints in their testing environment. In the airline industry, this is magnified, as all carriers have to make use of third party reservation systems. The billing for this access runs just like cell phone billing (but on a much bigger pricing scale!), with a set limit, followed by overage charges. Anything over the limit can get very expensive. In addition, the access itself is not cheap to begin with.

This airline wanted to expand their testing lab environments from four to nine. However, given the transaction fees I just described, and the associated hardware cots, this change would run into millions of dollars of extra costs on an ongoing annual basis. In addition to the extra transaction costs, the airline would have to purchase more hardware. Since you cannot just deal with airline and customer data over the public web for very real security purposes, they needed to provision special gateways and data circuits to interact with the third party source.

However, this was just the beginning of the problems they faced. Travel data is very complex and changing. There are weather delays, fare changes, rewards programs, partner systems, flight operation systems, and so on. To build applications, you need access to stable customer and flight data scenarios for testing and validation.

The airline found that when they ran regression tests, about 10% of the test cases failed. The failures were not mostly due to bad software, but data volatility. They had to find a way overcome a huge number of false negatives due to bad test data. Teams would often waste half their day chasing down these errors. Increasing the number of test labs by over 100% would only compound these data troubles.

Introducing a strategy that covered both automated testing and Service Virtualization addressed these issues, so we brought LISA to bear and demonstrated how to virtualize these kinds of services that are prohibitively costly and complex to replicate using conventional means.

First, they eliminated the need to incur almost all the transaction costs to the third party system by accurately simulating the required data as virtual services for development and test purposes.

This also took the additional hardware costs for gateways and data circuits out of the equation by reducing infrastructure needs and virtualizing any new infrastructure requirements. These hard dollar cost savings more than covered their investment in automated testing.

There was more, as the cycle of false negatives due to bad test data was broken, as stable test data could be provided. This may prove to be the largest source of saving overall. Now application development could proceed at a much faster clip, helping the airline generate customer benefits and revenue from the new application much quicker, and reducing development costs.

They are also planning to make use of the automated testing system and the data it generates to streamline their training programs and make them accessible on a local basis, reducing the travel expenses associated with getting their employees flying on the new systems they develop.

You can find the complete case study here.

SOA Success Stories Part Four: Global High-Tech Manufacturer

Here's another tale in our series of field stories to show successful cases of ensuring quality and agility for dynamic enterprise apps. This case covers how a global high-tech manufacturer tested and delivered a demanding enterprise e-commerce site under time and budget.

In this case there was a lack of visibility and traceability that was posing a serious threat to mission critical business operations. Unlike some of our other cases, this company had complete control over the design and implementation of this complex multi-tier app, yet they still had no way to trace a single action to a single source in the maze of multiple service layers.

Ruston Vickers, iTKO's CTO & co-founder, worked on this effort. He said that before the test automation project, the company had to do manual sequential tests on each subcomponent to find error sources: "It was like having to place a plumber at every faucet to find the source of stoppage in a house with hundreds of rooms. Instead of having the plumbers yell back and forth across the large house as they progressed through the system, turning on faucets one step at a time, LISA gave the company an x-ray machine to see a top-down view of the entire system at once and determine the cause and effect."

This top-down viewing capability cut their best prior testing time in half. Formerly the company employed 10-15 consultants just to continually test only the end result UI behaviors of their system. Now, with a highly reusable and complete test suite in place through iTKO LISA, the consulting firm can conduct the same process with one part-time resource, at a higher level of accuracy, as the automation capabilities of LISA erase the margin for error inherent in manual testing.

The company is pleased with the reduced costs and increased speed of implementation, and the consultant on the project is pleased with the increased value they can provide to their client. With LISA they both have a reusable asset that will continue to provide value as they go forward together with new releases.

Reusable, continuous validation activities save hard dollars in testing labor costs, and the number of support costs incurred, but cost savings aren't the only value. In a customer-facing environment, eliminating 1-2 months of time to successful release can make a huge impact on incoming revenue potential.

Stories from the Field - Part Three: Major European Telco Company

This is the third installment of an open-ended series of enterprise quality & virtualization success stories from our field engineers. It covers how a major European Telco company ensured BPM quality with test validation across all application layers.

"This was a classic case of being caught in the middle with moving targets all around," reports Ruston Vickers, iTKO's CTO. The telco needed to be able to validate downstream B2B integration after taking an upstream provisioning request, processing it as the middleman, and passing it on. The problem was that they had no control over the upstream and downstream services. "Handling this validation issue by calling on the real up and downstream processes was not feasible, and mocking them up manually required too much work and left you trying to model and hit simultaneously moving targets," Ruston said. This made it almost impossible to track down the source of many bugs.

Ruston's team solved this mission impossible problem by providing the capability to accurately simulate both ends, the middle, and the entire process in real time. LISA can first act as the upstream requester, launching the process and then it following it through the multiple service layers to completion. This is done through invocation, validation, and where services are designed but not yet built, the addition of Service Virtualization to simulate the needed services to complete validation.

The actual live upstream and downstream services are then no longer required for testing and validation, freeing the middle level services to rapidly test independently, also avoiding any third party transaction costs or data management issues. The result of implementing iTKO LISA's Validate and Virtualize products was transformational for this telco, and included the functional validation of 120 different order types, as well as load testing of TIBCO BusinessWorks processes and database stored procedures.

Higher quality was achieved through near 100% test coverage to validate end-to-end business process outcomes. In addition, there was faster time-to-market by removing system availability constraints and reduced transaction costs. You can read the complete case here. Our next case covers how a global high-tech manufacturer tested and delivered a demanding enterprise e-commerce site under time and budget.

Stories from the Field - Part Two: Leading Financial Institution

This is the second of an eight part series on "stories from the field" from our engineers and architects working with customers to solve the challenges of dynamic enterprise applications, based on SOA, BPM, integration suites, and ESBs.

It looks at how a leading financial institution eliminated a cumbersome and expensive manual testing process, freeing up resources and dramatically decreasing implementation cycle time. The bank set up a center of excellence (CoE) for middleware performance testing. In many cases one middleware test might connect with 70 to 80 systems that represent an alphabet soup of different technologies. To handle this effort, the bank built a very large custom test harness to respond to their load testing solution over the course of several years. But it could not meet all the changing needs and required a team of consultants just to keep it going.

The hand-coded responders were all one-offs that were not integrated, requiring so much rework that the team needed to push back releases by months to accommodate test cycles. Ken, the iTKO architect brought in, said that the bank felt this was not a scalable or cost effective solution anymore. Ken was able to "virtualize" or simulate these 70+ applications running within a Virtual Service Environment (VSE) in a few days - with more dynamic logic than the hand-built responders that had taken years to put in place.

Now they had an integrated solution that could handle the entire process through an automated testing approach that could provide ready access and data modeled to adapt to needed test scenario changes. The bank had been employing a team of highly skilled and highly paid consultants to maintain the test harness and perform testing – much of it manually. These consultants had been originally brought in for more complex application and test case development. Now they could focus on their original assignment. It was a win all around.

The bank greatly reduced their ongoing testing and validation costs and time. Several additional product releases per year are now planned. The solution consulting partners were also winners, as they were able to return staff to higher value tasks, maintaining a service level differentiator over lower skilled competitors for the manual tasks they had been pitch-hitting on.

In fact, the consulting company was so pleased by the outcome that they have started to build a consulting practice around the use of iTKO LISA for similar situations at other financial service institutions. It's informally been called the "bank in a box" solution because of its power and simplicity. We all know how much financial services firms need to cut costs these days so they should find a responsive audience. Go here to see the entire case. Our next case covers how a leading Canadian Bank removed constraints to greater productivity in the Test Lab.

Field Reports on SOA Success - Part One: National Cable Provider

Recently, there has been a lot of fun discussion about the death of SOA. Well SOA successes are quietly happening every day, and one of the keys is the use of robust testing and validation and, some cases, the use of service virtualization to speed up the testing and validation process.

SOA's shine may have worn off for some, but it is just another practice for designing and building dynamic, distributed enterprise apps. SOA may share boundaries with other technology practices: BPM, integration suites, and ESBs. All of these describe systems that are heterogeneous, distributed, multi-tier, and subject to frequent change by nature.

So call it what you will, not meeting the new challenges raised by this class of apps can lead to various unintended consequences and failures, or create bottlenecks to agility and cost savings which were the ultimate goal. We want to add to the conversation with a series of actual examples from the field to show successful cases of dynamic enterprise apps. This first one is a national cable provider.

This company had a very complex provisioning system - literally the "brains" that enables or disables what programming subscribers can see on their TV, depending upon requested configuration, on-demand status and special offers. The application was a complex application with several components that needed to interact at runtime in a secure transaction environment, and they had to operate efficiently and accurately to maintain customer satisfaction.

Our iTKO architect involved in this effort, Ken, said that before he and our integration partners at pureIntegration arrived, the cable provider staffers were hand building manual tests to try to cover these complex processes. Even a simple change could take the staff three weeks to build the less than adequate manual tests. Just getting ready to attempt to test a major release could take them several months, so the cable company was limited to only two major releases a year. This put them at a competitive disadvantage and added unnecessary expense to the testing and validation process.

Moreover, the QA manager noticed that manually testing was like trying to do deep sea exploration from a glass bottom boat. Gaining end-to-end test coverage and control, with automation, enabled them to move out of their testing silos and see the entire process. Now they can quickly spot error sources and correct them.

Ken said that in one case dozens of reported bugs were found to result from a single change. Getting past the 80%-20% rule and covering the most important and likely risk areas with automated testing first enabled them to spot these dependency failures in almost real time with each change. In the past, it was taking over three weeks to isolate the problem. Ken said that LISA was employed, enabling them to increase test automation and validation coverage from 15 – 20% to over 95%.

Ken added that “Saving several weeks in each test process has created a lot of excitement.” The results included the reduction of regression test execution from 3 weeks to 5-8 hours. The major release cycle was reduced by 6 weeks. The integration of LISA with the test and validation process also saved more than 95% of per-test costs, which is also an incentive to increase the test coverage to new features.

To read the entire case, go to iTKO LISA Case Study: Major Cable Service Provider.

Our next installment of this series will cover how a leading financial institution eliminated a cumbersome and expensive manual testing process, freeing up resources and dramatically decreasing implementation time.