The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

iTKO's 3 IT Predictions for 2011, and How 2010 Played Out...

Another year of accelerating change in IT has swept by, and as we clear out our inventory of leftover holiday cookies and cakes, we also like to collect some of our predictions for the upcoming year, while seeing how this past year went in retrospective. (Please note, these are in no particular order, and they are just the opinions of some iTKO execs we collected by passing the hat for thoughts - use at your own risk!)

Predictions for 2011: Are we entering a "Nirvana Age" for software development? We are starting to think so - more on this concept later, but here are 3 trends we predict for the coming year:

1. An Agile Resurgence is happening. Companies are increasing their commitment to Agile methodologies - but the big difference this time is that we're not talking about a few development teams adopting XP/Scrum etc. - Agile Resurgence will be the mandate Agility across the overall IT and software development lifecycle, so you will see it cover an entire delivery organization. Companies will measure their overall success in meeting customer requirements in terms of improved Agility - speed and efficiency across design, development, testing, support and services as a whole.
2. Enterprise Cloud will take hold. By the end of the year, we expect serious enterprise Cloud adoption to accelerate rapidly beyond merely using it to improve infrastructure and hosting capacity. A whole new class of business process applications that leverage cloud will appear, along with new Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities that make cloud an environment for collaboration and software development itself. We've been talking about DevTest Cloud for most of 2010, and we are seeing major enterprises take it as a part of establishing their enterprise-wide cloud initiatives.
3. Shakeout in Testing space is still not done: We have seen that many companies have delayed or deferred replacing their existing UI-based testing and load testing tools and focused mostly on development tools with testing as an afterthought. That is going to change bigtime, as companies can no longer afford to have exponentially increased test labor costs, and risk of failure accelerating faster than software can be delivered. Customers will demand both deeper testing coverage across complex multi-tier apps, as well as new Cloud- and service-based delivery models for testing that can offer more flexibility and labor efficiency.

Retrospectives for 2010: Did we call it? Well, this time last year we were busy releasing LISA 5 Suite, so we didn't stop to make 2010 predictions we can grade ourselves against. But here's some observations we couldn't help but make.

1. The Cloud took off like we thought it would. We're not a market research firm, but we couldn't help but notice an explosion in Cloud strategy and implementation. In our own customer base, the number of inquiries and interest of "how do I move to Cloud?" and "Should I use a Private Cloud?" increased by 3-5X over just the last 6 months. We sponsored a couple Cloud-related events and webinars, and found a huge increase in both attendance and sophisication of this audience.
   
   
2. Service Virtualization became a line item on the IT budgets of market leaders. We saw an increasing number of project requirements and RFPs here and in Europe specifically calling for more than just "stubbing" of responders for testing and development. 2010 was a breakthrough year for the concept of virtual services: the simulation of behavior, performance and data characteristics of systems that are constrained or unavailable throughout the development lifecycle, and customers want to know how to resolve these big constraints to delivering software. A big part of this awareness was assisted by our partnerships with HP and IBM, allowing customers of their testing and ALM product suites to simulate constraints in their environments with capabilities from iTKO's LISA Virtualize.
3. A weak economy did NOT take any pressure off IT to deliver more functionality, faster, maybe it was even worse due to it... While companies likely spend 2-3x the time scrutinizing their budgetary plans for IT, and hiring was usually frozen, companies could not afford to slow down one bit. Increased competition for customer dollars, rapid consolidation and acquisition in many markets, and more regulation all created big IT projects, often without a commensurate increase in budgets or resources.
4. VMWare successfully defended its near monopoly on large enterprise IT virtualization; it was predicted by many they would fail (not us!) thanks to competitive or open-source pressures.
    
   
5. SOA Governance fell flat.  This was definitely last year's fruitcake, regifted. It still seems like such a great idea - the runtime part of governance enables companies to do some cool stuff which kept some of the players afloat, but we didn't hear many inquiries about SOA Gov all year long.

 

Drafting with ease behind Virtual Service Environments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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.

EuroSTAR 2009 Conference will be in Stockholm

I recently received the first issue of the STAR Tester Newsletter for 2009. We're still a long way off, but they are already accepting presentations. This year’s conference theme is: ‘Testing for Real, Testing for Now’. The EuroSTAR 2009 Conference will be in Stockholm, 30th November – 3rd December 2009.

This is a great annual European event, we enjoyed participating last year, and iTKO's own John Michelsen spoke on SOA Testing, Validation & Virtualization. Here are two extensive reviews of the 2008 version that occurred in den Haag, Thoughts About EuroStar 2008 by Randy Rice and Notes from EuroSTAR 2008 by Rikard Edgren. Randy wrote that “One of my tests of a good conference is whether I'm torn between attending track sessions - and I was.” The theme of that conference was "The Future of Software Testing.”

There is a EuroSTAR community blog to support the event. The blog says that it is “...dedicated to Software Testers worldwide. We hope that this blog will allow testers to share their individual EuroSTAR experiences and also give testers new to EuroSTAR, a glimpse of what the event is all about. This forum should also act as a place where testers can interact, discuss issues important to them and debate the most up to date trends within Software Testing.”  I am sure activity will pick up there as we get closer to the conference. 

European BPM Related Conferences for 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some European Blogs Related to BPM and SOA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European SOA: Ahead of the Curve?

I'm in Germany right now, looking forward to a session at ZapThink's Practical SOA in Frankfurt event tomorrow. I'll be joining some peers from companies like T-Mobile, Swisscom, Novartis and SwissLife who are going to be sharing their own SOA success stories.

Why does SOA seem to be moving forward a little faster in Europe than in North America? We've posed these kinds of questions in our surveys and forums, and often it seems that stateside, the term "SOA" can polarize some IT teams - it's an "either/or" decision at the architectural level.

Talking to our EMEA director, Wilfred, he says part of the reason it seems adoption is high in Europe is that it SOA is often driven by developers working in smaller teams. Service-orientation can be started on a much smaller scale, and tested pragmatically before rollout to the larger organization. So, SOA there doesn't need to be an enterprise-level initiative in all cases, it can be something the company dabbles in before making a full commitment.

The upside of this pragmatic approach is that the SOA project can leverage some small wins to pay for a bigger commitment. The downside? Companies still need to beware of publishing services without a higher level of architectural coordination between teams.

This isn't to say that there aren't also companies in Europe starting from a strong enterprise architecture perspective and defining a top-down approach to SOA. I look forward to meeting both the pragmatists and the strategists this week!