The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

Mock & Roll will Never Die

If you already have built a "mock system" in order to advance development, why would you need something better? I recently had a good conversation with our East architecture lead Ken Ahrens (see more of his work here) after a great CA World event for ITKO was winding down in Las Vegas. We had a lot of questions in our sessions about the development shop that has already "rolled their own" system of stubs and mocks - and what that meant for Service Virtualization practices.

When a company says they already have a mock system, we normally view that as a very positive sign - and tell them as much.  Often we have to convince customers that incomplete and unavailable systems are development problems that need to be solved, before we can even talk about the idea of Service Virtualization capabilities. Whereas the customer with a mock system already understands this is a real problem that needs to be solved.

I usually comment at this point about how we’ve replaced several mock systems at other customers (banks, utilities, telcos, etc...) with LISA's service virtualization. SV really is the productization of the stub and mock space, with enough sophistication to support more complex logic and performance scenarios. Similar to how you wouldn’t write your own database nowadays, it doesn’t make sense to build your own mock system when there is an industry standard solution for this available.

Some questions that usually come up:

• Does your mock system meet 100% of your needs and is it used on every single project?
• How expensive is the mock system to build and maintain?
• How fast do you need new mock services built, and are they ready on time?

If a development shop is mocking a single binary transaction -- that is a simple enough problem to solve with a bit of code. But as soon as multiple systems talk to each other, and multiple business scenarios need to be validated - the manual stub approach quickly starts to trip over its own weight, and the process of mocking and massaging test data and environments can drastically slow down delivery.

On one recent visit to an East coast utility, the customer team decided that LISA began to win (from a cost perspective) after only 10 rather finite services were mocked.  One of our favorite banks established a "center of excellence" for enabling teams with Service Virtualization instead of stubs, and measured a full return in about 6 months - then did something even more interesting by rapidly fixing issues found in production by virtualizing production behavior into the dev environment.  A successful customer like this doesn't just buy software, they take the adoption of the practice seriously - and it's usually the guys who have experienced the pain of rolling their own mocks that see the potential benefits the fastest.

In short – if you already do mock services we think it’s a good thing, so tell us about your story!

 

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.

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.

News from IBM on Development & Testing in the Cloud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Addressing a Lack of Capacity in the Performance Lab - Webinar 6/24

If there ever was an easy reason to adopt Service Virtualization techniques, it would be the performance lab. We are seeing customers reckoning with this problem over and over: highly skilled performance testers, with expensive lab infrastructure and software, WAITING around to access needed resources to do their job and ensure expected software performance levels.

In a couple weeks we are doing a big webinar on IT Briefcase with our partners Accenture: "Addressing a Lack of Capacity: Virtualizing the Performance Lab for Optimal Results."

The free session is June 24, 2010 1:00 - 2:00 pm, Central Time (2-3PM Eastern)

I am presenting with Accenture Partner Scott Gilliland, who runs the Global Performance Engineering practice for the firm, with experts who have already implemented these tactics to some incredible results at our joint customer sites - we are talking increasing the amount of performance testing done to go well beyond 6-Sigma reliability, at less 25% of the existing labor and infrastructure cost.

Today's applications are more distributed and complex than ever - and that makes for an entirely new economy around needing high performance that can't be ignored. Fail to perform, and you will certainly lose customers. Scott will expertly describe the financial reasons for eliminating constraints from performance testing.

What's interesting to note is that we usually find that performance labs are acutely aware they have idle time waiting for assets to run their load tests against, and wasted effort on coding simulations. But they don't know what these inefficiencies actually cost the business - until now.

Short of building a copy of the whole enterprise's software infrastructure for each test lab (which can cost millions for a typical F1000 enterprise), and manually coding all of the dependencies (such as mainframes owned by other divisions or partners, SaaS providers, Cloud-based services) needed to respond to the performance tests, there is another way to achieve a realistic environment that is truly elastic.

Service Virtualization captures and creates a realistic, highly scalable and responsive version of virtually any system the Performance Lab needs to connect to, using whatever tools they currently use for load testing - whether that is HP Performance Center (LoadRunner), IBM Rational platforms, Micro Focus' Segue tools, or some of our own system-wide or Web 2.0 test & validation apps.

These virtual services become assets that look and act exactly like the real thing - but they are very lightweight, low cost simulations, with very stable data scenarios, adjustable or variable response times, and the ability to be ready for reuse 24/7 at a moment's notice. The resulting virtual performance lab allows these software to be continuously performance tested at a component level, ensuring that when the pieces come together, they exceed SLA expectations.

Let's define a goal together: No more constraints on capacity in the performance lab. Hope you join us June 24 and find out how to get there.

Webinar: "4 Catalysts for Optimizing Software" with Cognizant, 5/27

Let's preview an upcoming webinar we have scheduled with our partners, Cognizant, this Thursday May 27th at 10:00AM Central, titled: "The 4 Catalysts for Optimizing Enterprise Software Development and Testing." Cognizant's AVP of Testing, Satish Thiagarajan and Global Head of Testing Sumithra Gomatam, along with our founder &Chief Geek John Michelsen.

This webinar (sign up here) will assume you already know about today's distributed, "modern" architectures such as SOA, BPM, SaaS and Cloud computing deployments. What will be discussed are the 4 "catalysts" or inflection points that can bring on huge acceleration in the speed of delivering and testing software applications in today's environment. In a nutshell, these techniques are:

• Elimination of dependencies with Service Virtualization;
• End-to-end functional and regression test automation;
• Highly available, unconstrained Performance Testing;
• Faster defect collaboration between QA and Development.

We've had success working with Sumithra and Satish's teams both in the US and in India, and we hope you can join iTKO and Cognizant for this free session to learn more about these change agents in your software lab. Feel free to bring your questions and we will address them all (either on the call or immediately after!)

News Today: iTKO Teams with IBM for Application Virtualization in the Cloud

News flash (5/6/2010) - today from IMPACT 2010 we announced a new solution offering with our partners at IBM. Known as IBM Application Virtualization Services (or "AV"), this solution takes what LISA does well (Virtualization, Validation, Testing, Defect Resolution), wraps it with IBM services and technology, and makes this offering available on premise, or through an IBM Cloud platform, to solve critical customer needs.

• Press Release: "iTKO Teams with IBM on New Cloud Service to Help Clients Rapidly Deploy Applications"
• Download the Datasheet: "iTKO/IBM Application Virtualization"
• For more, see our Solution page for Application Virtualization

AV presents a highly differentiated solution to our joint customers, a solution that will revolutionize the way companies with distributed teams and technology components can build their applications. It's all part of a vision that goes beyond considering where software is deployed, to solving the root challenges of first successfully doing Development and Testing of that enterprise software where it will live in the Cloud.

Webinar: No "free beer" in Service-Oriented and Cloud-based Applications?

We have harnessed the flexibility of readily available services, which can be assembled into business processes, and provisioned on Cloud-based, pay-as-you-need infrastructure. But despite our best expectations, there still is no "free beer" available in service-oriented and cloud-based applications for the enterprise.

What's raining on our parade? Someone has to pay to make sure that as we increase the number of distributed software components and processes, that the combined slurry of services will perform and function as expected by the business.

Face it, we are caught in a conundrum. While we can develop and assemble new business processes faster than ever from components, we also must deal with the fact that the rate of change and complexity of business software is only increasing. Every new service we connect to has the potential for failure. With that, the quality assurance effort and infrastructure cost of assuring reliable delivery of enterprise applications is also ballooning exponentially.

Let's turn the lights on, and discuss why the advent of SOA, BPM and Cloud Computing approaches, while a good thing on so many levels, also increases risk and cost. And maybe along the way, we will find some practices like robust automation and Service Virtualization that may get us closer to AFB (Almost Free Beer) -- readily available Virtual Test Environments, and increased reuse, so we can improve performance and quality with a much smaller incremental cost.

We are excited to present an upcoming "dual continent" webinar March 3rd for Europe and North America, featuring our partner Accenture's John McEvoy, head of EMEA testing, and our founder and Chief Geek, John Michelsen.

Webinar: "No Free Beer" in Modern and Cloud-Based Application Performance and Quality - http://www.itko.com/resources/webinar_accenture_mar2010.jsp.

Hope to see you on the webinar, and bring your questions for John and John.

iTKO Webinar Dec. 15th with TCS: Modernizing Application Quality

Here's a little reminder to stop by and register for next week's webinar with iTKO and TCS, titled "Leveraging Modern Software Quality to Prevent Cost and Schedule Overruns" - running December 15, 2009 at 1:00PM EST. This session will feature Siva Ganesan, the Global head of Assurance Services of TCS, and iTKO founder/Chief Geek John Michelsen.

A sneak peek into this production: a lot of new thinking appears in the content. TCS has one of the most mature software testing practices around, but this webinar focuses firmly on the future. Automation techniques, virtualization of constraints and a rapid, iterative approach are needed to tackle the kinds of advanced, distributed, heterogeneous architectures we need to test.

Sign up for the webinar here: http://www.itko.com/resources/webinar_tcs_dec2009.jsp. If you miss the time, we'll send you an archive link later.

Virtual Data in the Clouds - Enabling Remote Testing Teams

We had a chance to briefly touch on this topic in our founder John's latest webinar with Infosys' Aparna Sharma on "Accelerating Modern Application Quality" -- archive available now.

A question came in during the show that was particularly pertinent to the topic at hand. How can these virtualized services and data models work in the Cloud to allow collaboration with distributed teams, especially offshore test teams? Indeed, without a good approach for virtualizing data in a Cloud-based development environment, you simply cannot get there without wasting about 80% of your effort and cost in testing today's service-based applications. 

You expected ubiquitous, flexible access to needed resources with Cloud Computing. So why can testing teams end up sitting on the bench instead of getting involved as early as possible? Much of the challenge lies within the test data itself.

In short there are "Wires hanging out of your Test Cloud" as we illustrate here - especially when it comes to Data. You can't just take a 4TB database or an external SaaS-type data provider and plop them into a hypervisor and provision them in the Cloud. Test Data is a frontier because it is not easy to replicate via known means - it is either too bulky or too dynamic to reliably move to the Cloud, but we absolutely must provision teams with good test data, in order to do enough testing to rely upon these systems for business.

Primarily there is the problem of valid data access needed for thorough testing. Most often, this is locked up in some mainframe or live service that is simply too critical to open up to the testing team. Since business continuity usually trumps new product testing, IT Ops guys will crack down on test access time windows to the live systems and the data within them. So you might have a 2 hour period of access - barely enough time to test an on-premise system, much less a Cloud-based system that is talking to other data providers.

Second, there is the problem of data sensitivity. Even if we have contracts and a good working relationship in place, we don't want to be putting data that needs to stay private in the hands of any third party. So we do need to mask or "desensitize" the data so it follows the expected structure, without BEING someone's social security number or bank account. This has always been a concern in healthcare for instance (see HIPAA guidelines), but the level of certification, compliance and controls around data privacy and security in every industry is only getting tighter. We need to be able to give these remote teams obfuscated data so they can continue testing efficiently.

Third, data setup and teardown continues to be difficult in Cloud environments. We touched on one of our favorite examples in the webinar, a Telco that literally spends 2 hours running tests, and 2 whole DAYS resetting data. Many of these problems wont go away when the Cloud-provisioned system is talking to external dependencies and systems of record that need to be accessed and later cleaned out of running systems. Quite often this is a main point of contention, as a test could corrupt the tests of other teams or even the live systems if not contained correctly.

These are just three concerns. There are many other open issues of how Test Data will be handled when we move to Cloud-based environments. I thought Judith Hurwitz nailed this as one of her observations in her "What are the Unanticipated Consequences of Cloud Computing" post:

"Data will increasingly be seen as a reusable resource that can be used in lots of different situations. There will continue to be strategic line of business applications but they will be more systems of record that keep track of the final result of actions that take place dynamically in the cloud. The value of data is not in its tight packaging as we have been used to for decades but it the flexibility to move, transform, and leverage data. The watch word for data in this new model will be Trusted Data in the Cloud."

Couldn't agree more with this observation. As we move to ever more distributed, flexible computing models, we are supporting these with very distributed development and testing teams. The data needed for the software lifecycle must be shared among business partners, on shore and off-shore teams, so success will all come back to our level of Trust that the Cloud will give us the data we need, and not give us the side effects of data we don't need.

Of course, here at iTKO, we've been stretching out our LISA Virtualize to better support Test Data Management (TDM) solution efforts with the capture, manipulation, dynamic "desensitization" and Virtualization of data used in Cloud-based development environments. Look for more discussion and research from us soon on how expert testing teams are taking advantage of Virtual Test Data in the cloud.

The News - Working with Harris on Complex Validation Problems

Today iTKO made an announcement about our strategic partnership with Harris Corporation, a Fortune 200 systems integrator we have been working with on several significant projects in the US Department of Defense and other federal agencies. Read the press release here.

What is significant about this?  Many organizations (commercial and government) are realizing that while developers can build and integrate software faster than ever, their testing efforts have proven inadequate at keeping up. These agencies need proactive, automated, and continuous validation to ensure trust and reliability in federated, mission-critical systems that are subject to constant change.

iTKO and Harris are responding to this challenge with a validation and virtualization solution that will appeal to organizations that trust and rely on these systems. Examples include federal emergency management centers, military command and control systems, financial institution trading systems, utility energy management grids, airline traffic control networks, and many others.

While we have been cooperating with leading government contractors like Harris for 4 years on integration projects like these (see this iTKO paper on Federated governance we first wrote 3 years ago...) we have seen a major shift occurring in the way Federal agencies specify and manage their complex applications. They are moving to a shared services / shared components model, where different functional units (or, services) are consumed and managed by different teams, with a central point of certification and testing for these services.

A federated, shared governance model means there is just enough governance enforced at a central level, and authority for managing and using the application components is doled out to the constituents. We compare it to a Federal government vs. state's rights, vs. city council authority model. The federal government might specify a budget for a highway, but it doesn't dictate where parking is located in the city.

This federated model works very well for defense agencies and the many firms that support them, as they are all working toward a common goal - delivering functionality to the warfighter with maximum efficiency. As we have frequently mentioned in this blog, businesses would do well to take cues from how government scales their systems and cooperates to meet goals - they were leaders in SOA and will likely continue to lead the way in many aspects of modern application governance.

Webinar 10/27 w/Infosys & ITKO - Accelerating Modern Application Quality

You might say we are between a pillow and a hard place right now when it comes to modern applications. On one side, we have killer new development approaches such as service orientation, BPM, and SaaS that provide us with a much greater amount of flexibility and speed in assembling reusable components and services. Development time and costs have indeed gone down, while functionality gets ever more sophisticated.

However the unintended consequence of being able to build and change applications so quickly comes at a price. Testing and validating these systems has become harder than ever. So many interconnected, interdependent components means an exponential increase in potential points of failure, and an inability to have access to a stable and affordable test environment. So much so, that testing environment and error repair costs are outstripping development cost in many cases.

There's gotta be a way out of this situation. Fortunately, we have some experts ready to help shed some light on these new costs and track down the quality issues in modern applications. We are privileged to have our founder/"Chief Geek" John Michelsen, presenting with Infosys' head of Client Services, Aparna Sharma on this upcoming session:

Webinar with Infosys and iTKO: "Accelerating Modern Application Quality: Testing Strategies for Reducing Risk and Cost in Today's Distributed Application Environment"
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 – 1:00 PM Eastern (US) Time

Between these two, you have a great deal of experience leading and advising test and development teams in hundreds of engagements with the most complex types of software environments. So I expect nothing less than finding out what works today (and what didn't work) for real enterprises. After all, time-to-market is measured by delivery success, not the rate at which developers can string together new (but untested) functionality.  Hope to see you there, and bring your questions!

Webinar 9/23 with Perficient's Eric Roch: Addressing SOA Quality Gaps

Many of our initial customer discussions focus on assessing the "health" of your SOA and Integration efforts. How do you measure health in the distributed software applications like we see in every major enterprise? It's not just about measuring application performance and response time.

There are many details such as functional accuracy, time per release, and availability for testing that directly impact how healthy the IT environment will remain over time.

You may remember last year's blockbuster "ESB-Test-Fest" webinar with a leader from one of our key integration partner leaders and the author of "The SOA Blog," Perficient's Chief Technologist Eric Roch. Well now we have another one coming up that takes the next step into testing and validating the entire SOA application lifecycle with Eric and iTKO's co-Founder and CTO Ruston Vickers - two guys with as much practice experience solving the deepest integration quality challenges as you'll find.

Webinar: "Overcoming SOA Integration Testing Challenges and Other Critical Gaps to SOA Quality and Efficiency" on iTKO.com

September 23, 2009 - 1:00-2:00 PM Central
with Eric Roch, Chief Technologist, Perficient, and Ruston Vickers, CTO & Founder, iTKO.

Bring along your questions to this one-hour session and hope to see you there.

Webinar 9/17 w/ iTKO & Guest Accenture - Test and Develop Across Distributed Teams

We have an upcoming event happening on the IDevNews network that we are very excited about participating in. iTKO and guest speaker Accenture are co-presenting a webinar Thursday, September 17, on achieving quality among distributed systems and teams. iTKO Chief Scientist, John Michelsen, and Accenture Partner, Jeff Wilkinson, will present and answer questions on the topic and related solutions.

We've had great success partnering with Jeff's group at several key customer engagements, demonstrating how application testing and integration expertise can be aligned with LISA validation and virtualization solutions to improve collaboration between client and partner software delivery teams. So expect this talk to be full of good customer examples encountered in the field.

Webinar: "Achieving Quality & Agility Across Distributed Test & Development Teams" with iTKO and Guest Speaker from Accenture, September 17

Here's the session information:(Now Available as an Archive)

• Date:  Thursday, September 17th
• Time: 1:00 PM Eastern (10:00 AM Pacific)
• Speakers: iTKO Founder & "Chief Geek" John Michelsen
  Accenture Partner, Global Delivery Network, Jeff Wilkinson
• Moderator: Vance McCarthy, Editor, Integration Developer News
  

Abstract: This webinar highlights how Accenture is applying a Center of Excellence approach to testing, including best practices to increase quality and cost savings in complex, modern applications. iTKO’s LISA Test and Virtualization solutions will be featured to show how complete, automated testing and the elimination of dependency constraints across the software lifecycle can drive down costs and enable faster time to market. Join “Achieving Quality and Agility Across Distributed Test and Development Teams” for proven advice and examples of how enterprise customers are improving their software quality and bottom-line results.

Realizing the Benefits of Enterprise Integration and SOA at Lower Costs

We have now made available the complete podcast of a recent webinar in a compact video: Realizing the Benefits of Enterprise Integration and SOA at Lower Costs, featuring iTKO’s John Michelsen and Perficient's Eric Roch who cover how to achieve shorter release cycles and lower costs within SOA implementations. Here's an overview of some of the topics covered in this well-attended session on iDevNews.

Eric begins with key challenges to successful EAI and SOA implementations and some case study examples. Perficient is involved in technology implementation with over 1500 consultants. Eric leads the Business Integration Practice that includes BPM and SOA. He covered integration testing that includes a combination of services, components, and systems. Eric said that the scope of most projects causes test environment complexity issues and service availability issues as we have often discussed here. Often quality assurance is pushed to the end, and companies end up with infrastructures that do not perform. There are also complex dependencies between development groups.

Tools are also often dated holdovers from client server days. So companies must either build or buy new test tools. Most companies start off in a build mode but they end up with tools or custom "test harnesses" that cannot be used in a repeatable way. The test harness building option can become more time consuming than building the application itself. Eric encourages companies to make a well-considered test tool decision to ensure there is sufficient agility. Eric then went into great detail on the specific test requirements in SOA and provides a case study from an electric utility company where they employed multi-tier testing with LISA, and used the Virtual Service Environment capability to simulate "test reponsive" endpoints on the ESB, Services and data layers, rather than hand-coding their own responders. See the attached diagram for an example:

iTKO founder and "Chief Geek" John Michelsen then drilled down into a bit more detail on testing, validation, and virtualization within SOA. He focused on areas where you can drive out costs and provide greater efficiencies. John mentioned that traditional testing methods cannot automate testing in the complex world of SOA and this limitation produces significant inefficiencies. We can now build applications faster than we can test them using the traditional methods, and this adds unintended costs to SOA implementations. The power of SOA to integrate services raises the complexity to test this integration.

John covered how iTKO LISA automates testing, provides continuous validation of the integrated services, and offers virtualization to get around availability constraints on testing and validation. Virtualization gives almost infinite ability to virtualize constraining services and also strips out up to 90% of traction costs for these services. He mentioned an example from a cable company where a simple code change caused significant ramifications to the services that were affected. Continuous validation can pick this up.

Then a Q&A session allowed for further exploration and a great deal of interaction. The first question asked if the John and Eric had noticed project failures when firms attempted to integrate several ESBs, often as the result of mergers or acquisitions. John gave a number of examples and how the issues were addressed with iTKO after the problems occurred. Eric offered other examples and how they handled the issues.

The next question asked how to use virtual environments for integration testing. When can you use service virtualization versus requiring a live validation? John aid that this is a great question as it gets to the heart of the iTKO virtualization approach. LISA does not virtualize you, it virtualizes the things you are dependent on. In about 80% of your development cycles, that fact that your downstream service is live is a problem that service virtualization can address. Now in the final stages of integration testing, then you want to test against live data. So you virtualize your dependencies to take costs out during development and then switch to live data at the end. Eric offered some more examples.

The next question asked if John and Eric had experience with the virtual validation of SOA governance and how this worked? John first replied. LISA provides the infrastructure to do this and experts at firms like Perficient can use LISA and integrate it as the validation engine. Eric added that governance is about people, processes, and policies. He likes to fit the governance model to align with the culture of the organization. Then you measure it and change it over time. You cannot get too heavy handed about governance without creating adoption problems. Eric went on to offer more details on how they do this.

The next question asked how a delivery partner like Perficient can keep its own costs down in a complex implementation to stay competitive. Eric said they bring expertise and they have a set of methodology to increase project velocity. He often sees that SOA is too focused on architecture and services but not covering the business issues and the quality concerns. It is about the process and not the technology.

Then the moderator asked why testing is such a big chunk of SOA implementation costs when there is now a modular architecture. John said that at the granular level testing is easier. The problem comes with the overall number of dynamic parts and the resulting complexity. Eric said the problem of dependencies in the lifecycle has existed for a while, even with mainframe systems. You can get efficiencies if you can eliminate dependencies.

We encourage you to hear the complete podcast. It is available at our iTKO Resources site.

Minimize IT Outsourcing Risk with Collaborative Quality - Part Four

This is the fourth in a four part series that summarizes the key points in Minimize IT Outsourcing Risk with Collaborative Quality. You can click on the title to get the complete white paper. In the previous post in this series we looked at how to handle changing components and dependencies and achieve validation on an ongoing basis, as well as how to enable parallel development and testing without constraints.

Too often, companies allow the success of their outsource efforts to hinge on the performance of the services partner alone. In this post, we summarize best practices and responsibilities for the outsourcing consumer, after all, successful collaboration must be a two-way street.

• Reward Outsource Partners for Delivery Success... Not Just Delivering. – Do not prematurely sign off on delivered code assets just to meet a deadline, before adequate testing to ensure requirements are met.
• Trust, But Verify... Continuously - Distributed teams need to document component dependencies and test them as part of their deliverable. The consumer then needs to add tests at a business process level to ensure that expected behaviors are verified in the context of the consuming workflow.
• Enable Greater Productivity by Removing Constraints - Service Virtualization can enable multiple teams to work freely in parallel, rather than at odds due to the constraint of having access to live or incomplete systems. For instance the VSE in LISA Virtualize your partners with a way to decouple themselves from dependencies, by modeling test resources as Virtual Services that behave just like the rest of the application for testing and development purposes.

In summary, a partnership between outsource consumers and outsource providers based on shared objectives for collaborative quality is the best approach to maximize the benefits of IT outsourcing. Success depends upon a combination of people, processes and enabling technology to foster greater productivity, agility and quality across distributed teams. Key capabilities for this success include a collaborative framework for testing functional requirements, continuous test and validation of delivered components within the context of larger systems, and virtualization of constrained resources for greater productivity and improved time-to-market for distributed teams.

This ends our brief series on Outsourcing with Collaborative Quality - however we will continue to post on this important topic as we work with an ecosystem of customers and partners with the shared goal of delivering successful software releases on time and under budget. Your comments and ideas for future topics welcomed.

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.

Minimize IT Outsourcing Risk with Collaborative Quality - Part Three

This is the third of a four part series that summarizes the key points of our paper on Minimizing IT Outsourcing Risk with Collaborative Quality. You can click on the title to get the complete white paper.

In the last post in the series, we started to look at how to meet the risks and challenges of the outsourcing of IT development. In this post, we will look at how you can handle the changing components and dependencies and achieve validation on an ongoing basis. We will also look at how iTKO enables parallel development and testing without constraints.

In a SOA environment, a change to any service can create "unintended consequences" by causing unexpected failures on other dependent services. Throw in third parties through outsourcing and you compound the risk. To mitigate this risk, you need to continuously validate that delivered components have accounted for other elements in the workflow, and declare those in your tests, providing other team members with visibility into those dependencies.

Now, we need to "coat dependencies with testing" from this perspective, to prevent unintended consequences and run automated tests as needed on an ongoing basis. As a best practice, teams often use our solution to segment continuous validation activities along business process lines. To achieve maximum efficiency, distributed teams need to decouple their own environments from dependencies on live or incomplete systems, so they can continue working in parallel, rather than waiting on each other.

Think about many services engagements, and the amount of effort wasted on providing test access on a live transaction service or critical data source to a service vendor. Often there is a very limited window of time that can be offered by the companies IT ops team. Service Virtualization solves this bottleneck by allowing teams to design, develop and test their own components against changing environments by capturing and modeling the rest of the system (services, data, mainframes, etc) as running Virtual Services that simulate the behavior of the needed target environment.

Now multiple teams can design and test services in parallel and thus eliminate the constraints and dependencies of accessibility, availability and security for incomplete components and live service implementations. In the fourth and last post in this series we look at best practices for the outsourcing consumer.

Minimize IT Outsourcing Risk with Collaborative Quality - Part Two

This is the second of a four part series that summarizes the key points in Minimize IT Outsourcing Risk with Collaborative Quality. You can click on the title to get the complete white paper.

In the last post, we looked at the risks that can come from outsourcing IT development. Solving for these risks, not just through contractual negotiations, but in every day collaboration, can unlock the benefits of outsourced IT and address larger distributed development issues. In fact, if the appropriate IT infrastructure is available to better manage accountability and quality across distributed teams, while eliminating dependencies and constraints that restrict the agility and productivity of these teams, then it follows that these benefits could apply not just to outsourcing situations, but to any distributed team environment.

The first step in meeting the challenges of distributed teams is to gain a commitment across all teams to deliver components against well-defined requirements, in an auditable form, with the ability to accommodate the highly interdependent nature of today’s applications. This requires more than the right attitude, it requires the right tools.  Key testing, validation and virtualization capabilities will help firms mitigate these risks, and foster more collaborative quality across interdependent teams. These capabilities include:

1. A collaborative testing framework that directly verifies all technology layers with a high level of automation, so the team can better meet defined requirements at lower cost.
2. Continuous Validation so both parties can assure that each software component supports all upstream and downstream dependencies, in an auditable form.
3. A Virtual Service Environment (or VSE) which simulates the behavior of the highly interdependent and critical systems the teams must build and test against, even when they may not have access to live or completed components.

With these capabilities, the consumer of services should not just receive code assets, but also the deliverables they need to rapidly validate them - collaborative testing is matched to functional requirements. This is important, since resolving a misunderstanding early in the requirements phase can be orders of magnitude less expensive than fixing it later in deployment. So how can we move testing earlier into the lifecycle, to save costs and improve quality?

If the offshore partner’s testing is not tied to functional requirements, there is no way to know if there is any value to the test. The key to achieving collaboration is to demand that each component a team delivers is also comes with a suite of working tests that prove its functional requirements have been met. That way the next team, whether local or offshore, can iterate on testing from there.

For instance LISA tests are saved as .XML documents, then the business team can augment these processes by combining them with traditional requirements docs as executable test assets in ALM and Test Management tools. From this foundation, the tests become part of a continuous build and validation process, where regressions are proven to match defined requirements in later testing cycles. In our next post, we look at how you can handle the changing components and dependencies and achieve this kind of validation on an ongoing basis.

Minimize IT Outsourcing Risk with Collaborative Quality - Part One

This is the first of a four part series that summarizes the key points outlined in our paper on Minimizing IT Outsourcing Risk with Collaborative Quality. You can click on the title to get the complete white paper.

In the past ten years we have seen explosive growth in the practice of outsourcing IT functions to SIs (System Integrators) and services firms around the world. One of the fastest growing areas was the practice of outsourcing software testing to overseas teams. How as enterprise systems change from huge monolithic applications to more componentized, services-based solutions, the risk involved in outsourcing testing rises. This series looks at these risks and offers a solution.

First let’s set the stage by looking at four common IT outsourcing models:

1. Single Outsource Vendor where the buyer outsources all IT development and testing functions to a single SI partner. It offers the benefit of a single source for delivery of business applications, and one vendor to call if something goes wrong. However, it can also create high switching costs if you decide to change vendors later.
2. Outsourced Testing appears to be the easiest route if you decide to keep software development close to home. Since testing is by nature the process of “breaking” an application, many organizations find that a removed third party tester can be very valuable and impartial. This model was very easy to adopt when testing was a manual, point-and-click-on-the-screen endeavor that was best done by less costly staff. But times have changed, forcing testing offerings to evolve in sophistication.
3. Development Support. The many companies following this strategy are seeking both cost efficiency for non-differentiating development tasks, and access to developers with specialized skills needed to carry out specific tasks, such as migration between two different integration platforms that they may not have the expertise to pull off in-house.
4. Multi-Vendor is most common when development and testing activities are outsourced to different SIs. In this model, the company hopes to keep costs down, while the multiple providers keep each other "in check" to ensure project success. While you can mitigate some risks associated with a single outsource vendor, it can also be harder to manage multiple firms and get them to collaborate as efficiently.

Now let's look at the risks, as managing risk can be more important than obtaining upfront savings, if these cost reductions come back to haunt you later. After all, what good is a lower cost project if it takes 3 times as long to repair, or if your app fails in front of customers? Your outsourcing partner needs to be incented to build quality into the application, and not simply cut costs and initial project time.

This balance of quality and speed gets more complex when multiple teams are involved. While many larger companies have a multi-vendor strategy of procuring IT services, the more companies and teams that are involved in a project, the more opportunities there are for the information sharing and collaboration to break down.

What is needed is greater team accountability for shared deliverables all the way across the software lifecycle, which includes visibility into problems early, versus later in the deployment where they become significantly more costly. There is also the risk generated by dependencies on unavailable or inaccessible systems. Interdependent teams working together can be constrained by limited access to live applications and components that are not yet completed or available for testing. We see this issue often in the field as reported in our series.

When there is increased contention for shared resources, agility suffers as teams are forced to queue up for access, introducing scheduling delays and project risks. In some cases, teams may attempt to maintain their own test environments by replicating the components they need in a testing lab or custom test harness.

These team-to-team constraints on environments can become very costly to manage, requiring a high level of configuration, licensing costs and maintenance to keep current, even if it is running on virtualized hardware (which also has incremental licensing costs). And of course, some sensitive systems such as ERP mainframes are simply too big and have too much overhead to be replicated by conventional hardware virtualization means. In our next post in this series, we start to look at ways to meet these challenges and make more effective use of IT outsourcing.

iTKO & Cognizant Talk about Software AG Quality - Webinar

We're having an iTKO-hosted webinar Wednesday on a topic we revisit quite a bit, ensuring quality and agility for Software AG implementations. Our Software AG customers have very unique needs - from building and validating next-generation SOA and BPM architectures, to regression testing and virtualizing test labs while conducting an upgrade of their infrastructure to the latest version of webMethods.

iTKO's own Founder & Chief Geek John Michelsen will be joined by an expert from one of our key SI partners from Cognizant, Alfredo P. Reyes, the EAI Practice Head - North America, who will talk about best practice methodologies. This should lead to a very good discussion, so bring your questions.

Registration is free here:
"iTKO Webinar: Reducing SoftwareAG Implementation Costs and Risks with Collaborative Quality Across the Lifecycle"
Wednesday, February 25, 2:00PM Eastern

According to the webinar invitation, "Enterprise software implementations today are up against extremely difficult cost and time constraints. The need for greater cost savings, risk mitigation, quality, and end-to-end control for SoftwareAG/webMethods implementations is driving more customers to evaluate new solutions to optimize their software testing and delivery lifecycle."

New Outsourced IT Paper - Collaborative Quality to Minimize Risk

Though we are in the testing and virtualization business, over the last 5 years we have had a lot of requests from customers for our advice about working with one or more outsourcing firms. Since we have encountered virtually every kind of working arrangement in our engagements, we do have some experience encountering both successful - and unsuccessful - teams comprised of multiple services partners.

Given the current market conditions for IT outsourcing, it seems like there is more uncertainty than ever in this realm. Outsourcing is still a must-do activity for at least some of any large enterprise IT budget.

For the most part we've kept our advice to the realm of working with our SI partners - as part of working with joint end customers, we need to cover how to better collaborate on quality, validate that business requirements like accuracy and performance benchmarks are met, and improve agility to deliver new features ahead of schedule.

There are many up-front aspects of properly selecting, negotiating contracts and defining requirements that will make or break a project - too much to cover here - but in our experience once the partners are selected, what defines the back-end of delivering a successful project?

The number one post-agreement issue we've found when companies have deployment issues and cost overruns in working with services firms, is that partners must be rewarded not just on delivery, but delivering with quality. We're not talking about simply handing down a set of requirements and enforcing them. Good collaboration is a two-way street - both the consumer and provider of services must be responsible for defining and delivering things that are tested, and testable.

Anyway, we wrote what we think is a pretty good primer on the topic - you can get the new paper here: "iTKO Whitepaper : Minimize IT Outsourcing Risk with Collaborative Quality" - http://www.itko.com/site/resources/collaborativequality.jsp. We can't tell you who to work with, but we can provide some advice we've seen on what works!

We'll be posting further thoughts on collaboration between multiple on-shore and offshore teams here - your thoughts and questions on the topic are welcome.