The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

Forum: What was the biggest development for Cloud in 2011?

Participating again in the eBizQ forum on Cloud - and starting the process of looking back on a very eventful year for ITKO (and CA Technologies) in 2011, and picking our horses for what will happen in 2012.

The most obvious thing we saw in Cloud was a continued increase in consumerization and public level awareness, thanks to the usual suspects of Amazon, Apple, Google & Microsoft. You would be hard pressed to complete a download of consumer media or software these days without an invitation to claim your own Cloud spot for storing information or streaming your playlists.

But what about big business? How effectively did major companies in other industries embrace the Cloud? I just wrote a little piece on this here: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2011/12/what-was-the-biggest-development-in-the-cloud-for-2011.php

The biggest development for the cloud this year was, well... development IN the cloud. The categorization of Cloud as "another place to host your apps" provided some incremental efficiencies, yes, but that's a pretty commoditized activity. We always knew the cloud could do more!

Setting up elastic, on-demand dev and test environments in cloud actually turns out to be the best first use case of cloud in the enterprise. As developers need to create new functionality and verify its performance and quality on top of layers of existing stuff, they all inevitably demand their own environments.

We've seen many enterprises that have dev and test environments outnumbering production environments by 7-to-1 or more - and with inconsistent accuracy, as there is a great deal of manual setup and maintenance involved in each of those instances. Let's harness all that excess computing power and pool it inside the company as Private clouds -- and for higher capacity or seasonal needs, instantly provision ready environments in Public clouds. [more >]

Hopefully that makes sense to our readers who live in the application development and testing world -- you are in the vanguard of Cloud simply because these activities are the most natural first step, and there are immediate infrastructure efficiencies to be gained right off the bat.

As for the rest of our predictions and a look back, stay tuned...

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.

 

 

CA World Vision Award Winner – 5 Questions with First Data’s Laura Miller

Here at the CA World 2011 conference, the Agility Made Possible Customer awards were just announced, and First Data Corporation won the Vision Award for excellence in Service Assurance practices for their groundbreaking use of CA LISA to eliminate constraints and establish a Performance Testing Center of Excellence.

Read the press release here: “CA Technologies 2011 Agility Made Possible Awards Honors Customers’ Successes in IT Management and Security”

We have seen this company really take to heart the practice of delivering product to market faster using Service Virtualization to eliminate access constraints and setup time.

I recently had a chance to have 5 questions with Laura Miller, VP of Global Product Development at First Data, about her company’s journey using LISA to optimize performance and deliver product faster.

What is the project that brought on your team’s use of LISA?

We needed to performance test and rearchitect two of our front end financial institution products that both business and end clients will use in their own sites and call centers. It was critical that we have real-time levels of performance, or sub-second response times built in from the ground up. Our consulting partners helped us design a solution, and they recommended leveraging LISA to achieve the testing we needed.

Much of this Vision award is about finding new ways to overcome traditional constraints on software development. How has your group done this?

I like the fact that LISA really takes away traditional constraints. In the old days we would have had to build out the entire infrastructure, even if it was a smaller version of it. Or we would have had to write our own stubs. With LISA we were able to virtualize the mainframes and it took no time at all – it only took us two weeks to get a good representation running.

Also we wanted 24/7 testing, and we often have teams offshore testing at any time of day. With LISA I didn’t have any back-end constraint to moving forward. Not only were we able to get it set up quickly, but we were able to finish testing quickly, and therefore get our product out the door faster.

How important is time to market in your industry and what can IT do to accelerate it?

I don’t think there’s a market today where speed-to-market isn’t important. Look at Apple, FedEx and what they do. Obviously it is critical. For us it is all about the ability to deliver faster, and with higher quality, while reducing our setup time and not having to build new architecture. The setup and configuration of time of LISA also went very quickly as we got skilled people on the job.

The one thing we all know is that testing always gets short-changed. Timelines always get reduced, and that’s not changing. Being able to test 24/7, and not have downtime, really allowed us to push our application and know it would perform.

Behind any successful implementation or modernization there are usually multiple teams that need to get involved – has collaboration improved?

In our organization, collaboration was key on this. Before this initiative, we didn’t have a dedicated performance team in our Testing Center of Excellence, so we had to collaborate and bring in stakeholders from capacity planning, development, infrastructure teams, as well as functional testing and other groups. It was the first time we really brought all these groups together.

Our systems have grown internally and incrementally, over time. It used to not be as critical to worry about this because most apps were mainframe-based. Now these systems have become a dependency for us and even the business side is looking to us to confirm that we meet our client requirements.

What has it been like working with ITKO, now a CA Technologies company?

We’re very excited as a team to win the CA World Vision award this year. We were already CA customers and we have almost every tool they make, including APM, Clarity, and many other solutions. We are working on the next projects of performance testing and automation. 

I have always been pleased with ITKO and what they do with innovation, collaboration with clients and their drive to constantly make LISA a product that makes our lives better. A month ago I met with ITKO leadership and some other customers, and they wanted to hear our input on where they should invest more development time and what they could do better. That’s a very unique culture for a software company. We expect that level of passion and commitment to improve the product from the people who made LISA.

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.

CA World 2011: ITKO Takes Application Lifecycles Skyward Nov. 13-16

We are looking ahead to the must-attend IT event of the year for any enterprise concerned with delivering faster to meet customer demands. CA World 2011 in Las Vegas promises to be loaded with a complete raft of content covering every aspect of optimizing IT infrastructure, and especially composite and Cloud-based applications, where our LISA suite is an integral part of a new set of CA capabilities that will make "agility take flight" for application lifecycles - accelerating time-to-market for critical IT services at lower cost and risk.

CA World 2011 - Mandalay Bay Resort, Las Vegas, NV - November 13-16, 2011. [Register here.]

Come fly with ITKO at this event - we will be presenting throughout CA World with a complete track. We are presenting more than 8 breakout and customer sessions, 6 demo kiosks, a hands-on lab and much more, including a very cool interactive exhibit area, and opportunities to network with IT leaders from peer customers, ITKO executives and CA solution experts every day of the event.

To find our sessions, we recommend going to the Agenda Builder in the CAWorld site, and typing "ITKO" in the Search. Look for us in these sessions:

• ITKO Introduction: Where Agility Takes Flight - Lifecycle Optimization with CA LISA - Presenter: John Michelsen, Chief Geek & Founder, ITKO
• ITKO Tech Session: Service Virtualization – Driving Performance Before and After Release - Presenter: Ruston Vickers, CTO & Founder, ITKO
• ITKO Lab: Collaborative Defect Resolution with CA LISA - Presenter: Chris Kraus, LISA Product Manager, ITKO
• ITKO Customer Session: Agile Enterprise Delivery with LISA – Faster, Better, Cheaper - Leading LISA Customers with Moderator: Robert Humphrey, EVP Marketing, ITKO
• ITKO Best Practices & Analyst Session on Cloud Labs with voke: Develop & Test in the Cloud with Lifecycle Virtualization - Speakers: Theresa Lanowitz, principal analyst, voke; with John Michelsen, Chief Geek, ITKO
• ITKO Partner Session: Delivering Application Virtualization and Cloud Labs for Agility and Cost Savings with IBM - Speaker: Nick Carnovale, Partner Application Management Services, IBM (Intro by Shridhar Mittal, GM, ITKO)

We're serious about making your application lifecycles take flight, but we're having fun too! Once you’re here, come to ITKO Booth #250 in the EXPO, get your “ticket to ride” in our helicopter (a real FAA simulator!) and your pass to our VIP ITKO Customer Reception Monday night.

Look for more updates here and on other leading CA blogs like Service Assurance Daily on what we'll be doing at CA World 2011.

"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!

New Paper: What Should a Service Virtualization Solution Do?

More than four years ago, we released the first version of LISA's Service Virtualization capabilities because we saw a fundamental roadblock occurring at almost every one of our enterprise customers. Sure, they were more efficiently automating functional, regression and performance testing with LISA, but inevitably, teams would complain that they still weren't becoming as "Agile" as they hoped. They were losing productivity due to constraints brought on by other parties they were connected to: partners and other dev teams that either didn't complete their delivery yet, or limited access to their systems.

This is why I'm excited to introduce this new paper I wrote for our 4-part joint IT Thought Leaders Whitepaper Series with our partners at Infosys:

Key Capabilities of a Service Virtualization Solution (Download PDF)
Eliminating Software Development and Testing Constraints by Virtualizing Away Dependencies in the Environment

We have to face the fact that no development team can build and test software in isolation anymore, using repurposed client-server tools. Software lifecycles are becoming increasingly composite and service-based, while an increasing number of smaller, agile teams created interdependencies that must be addressed with a new kind of virtualization - something we called Service Virtualization: the simulation of constrained or unavailable systems for continuous availability throughout the software development and testing lifecycle.

Service Virtualization is now maturing into a widely adopted technology, with many technology vendors embedded, and a market to support it. There are key capabilities any advanced enterprise dev and test team will need to have in a "live-like" virtual service environment that is as close to the real thing as it needs to be, without the constraints of excess coding, maintenance and reliance on big-iron systems to deliver new competitive functionality.

This paper is a good read if you are wondering where Service Virtualization technology has advanced over the last few years. It's not just about replacing the "stubs and mocks" developers used to hand-code with more pat request/responses. Today's apps have become far too interdependent, and fast-changing for that to be sufficient. Testers and developers must be able to recreate complex, composite workflows in an environment that looks and acts just like the real thing.

A smart counterpart at Infosys, Vijay Sairam Pratap, just commented on the story with a very compelling, clear anecdote about the level of realism needed from Service Virtualization to enable robust service assurance in his latest blog from an HP conference. We'll talk about that example, and a couple other newer real-world stories in our next post.

Link to Service Virtualization Capabilities whitepaper download page: http://www.itko.com/resources/service_virtualization_solution.jsp

 

Whiteboard: What is LISA?

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming... We recently improved our video production abilities by leaps and bounds, so here's the latest high-tech whiteboard from ITKO's Founder & "Chief Geek" John Michelsen. Enjoy!

 

How does ITKO's LISA Solution enable Service Virtualization, Continuous Validation, Automation and Defect Collaboration to move development and testing life cycles forward faster with less risk and cost? It shouldn't take long to understand the basic concepts from scratch with this new video. Look for more educational resources here soon.

LISA Overview Video - Agile Composite App Dev in 6 Minutes

We just posted a long-form version of our very popular home page overview demo: "LISA: The Agile Composite Application Development Platform" that plays continuously and gives you a rundown of all 4 critical challenges and solutions relating to delivering software faster, with less cost and risk. Take 6 minutes and watch it here:

 

We also have an interactive version of the LISA overview demo that anyone can play here at http://itko.com/demo.

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!

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.

 

 

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.

News: iTKO Positioned as a Visionary In Magic Quadrant for Integrated Software Quality Suites

2011 Market Report Covering Functional, Load and Performance Test Automation and Management Vendors Now Available

DALLAS, TX, February 24, 2011 (BusinessWire) -- iTKO, the leading provider of Agile and Composite application development platform solutions, today announced it was recognized as a visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for "Integrated Software Quality Suites" for 2011 [report view license is now expired].

The study, which rates an estimated $1.3 billion market for test management, functional and performance testing software, assesses vendors according to their ability to execute and completeness of vision. Among the evaluation criteria were innovation, market understanding, marketing and sales strategy, product strategy and business model maturity.

"Rich-client technologies, Web-connected devices and private cloud architectures are placing stress on the testing organization to adequately test software. The shift toward packages, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM) also drives greater business analyst involvement in overall quality efforts, along with a shift in focus from finding defects in validation to ensuring that business objectives are met," said the report, authored by Thomas Murphy, Research Director, Gartner.

"We are proud to be positioned as a visionary by Gartner in today's competitive software quality management and testing market," said Shridhar Mittal, Ph.D., CEO, iTKO. "Our company's positive movement over the last two years is an indicator of the results our customers are reporting in optimizing their software lifecycle with LISA software. We also believe our profile is enhanced by iTKO's significant relationships with the three largest vendors in our space to enable LISA's capabilities for their teams and customers, including service virtualization, end-to-end testing of composite applications, and Cloud-based development labs."

Readers can now view a complimentary copy of the complete report, a US $1995 value, as part of a Gartner Newsletters Program for a limited time at this site: [report download now expired]

About the Gartner Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2011 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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!

 

 

John - Talking Cloud Development & Test on TMCnet

Here's a clip from my trip last week to Sys-Con's Cloud Expo 2010 West - I had the chance to catch up with TMCnet Executive Editor Erin Harrison for this interview about DevTest Cloud, and the trends we are seeing at this event.

Enjoy:

 

Here's to a continued - and inevitable - maturing of this sector of the Cloud market. Much of the remaining cost and constraint of IT is in properly equipping very expansive and widely distributed dev and test teams with ready environments that support needed scenarios.

 

Notes from Cloud Expo 2010 - This will fly...

Just got back from Cloud Expo 2010 in Santa Clara, CA, and this year's event was very much a coming of age for Cloud. Attendance and expertise levels were high. Two years ago when I audited a Cloud conference, the subject matter and vendors present seemed to be catering to an MIS or webmaster-level audience - largely a sideshow to the SOA/Virtualization audience concerned with moving servers off the racks of their data centers to save some incremental network and hardware costs.

iTKO's "Chief Geek" John Michelsen talked Tuesday morning on "The DevTest Cloud: An Essential Platform for Applications" and it was standing room only, with plenty of good audience interaction - a lot of developers and testers in the audience from a show of hands.

If you want to see the content from this session, and a little more specific to LISA DCM, I suggest you attend the iTKO webinar Wednesday, Nov. 10th, 1pm CDT: What Makes a DevTest Cloud Fly? (And what is the value?)

We are seeing a maturing of the space. Hardly anyone here is trying to "define Cloud" anymore. Not as many irrational fears about "is the Cloud secure? Can it perform?" Even in infrastructure terms, the Cloud offerings here are more specialized, for instance, leveraging private Cloud storage for content management uses, or offering industry-specific services atop cloud infrastructure. From my perspective talking to attendees on the Expo floor, people are looking for ways to develop business functionality to take advantage of Cloud, and not the other way around. Also it was good to see more reporters and analysts stopping by.

John also participated in the CTO Round Table that evening, and he will cover that discussion in an upcoming post.

Case Study - Test, Integrate and Virtualize Environments at Oracle

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

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

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

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

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

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

News from IBM on Development & Testing in the Cloud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

 

2010 - The year we met DevTest Clouds...

Today we released a new version of the whitepaper: "The DevTest Cloud: An Essential Platform for Application Development" -- and aside from looking really good (kudos to the designers), it contains a whole lot of new thinking about how we should best bring enterprise software development into the Cloud age.

If your enterprise has a Cloud initiative brewing, there is not a higher value lever to pull right now than optimizing development and testing activities in the Cloud. You should find out what DevTest Cloud platforms can do to bring the elasticity of Cloud to the software lifecycle: on-demand dev & test environments, with ready capacity at exponentially lower costs.

This is just a start, as we believe 2010 will be the year of the emergence of DevTest Cloud platforms. Leading vendors such as IBM, VMware, Citrix, Amazon and others are delivering elastic, on-demand infrastructures that are more than just places to host applications. We'll continue demonstrating how enterprises will be able to build their own DevTest Cloud platform that leverages these solutions.

Look for more blogs from us on this vital practice, as well as new videos, new press and articles, customer stories, and an appearance from John at the upcoming Cloud Computing Expo 2010.

You can get a copy of this paper, and find all the latest DevTest Cloud resources from iTKO here: http://itko.com/cloud.

Development vs. QA Video: "It Works on My Machine!"

Here at iTKO we know better than anyone that software development and testing is not all fun and games. But it can be pretty funny when you look at this dialogue between our little avatars Cass (QA) and Eric (Developer) - a back-and-forth that we've lived and seen played out in IT departments and software development shops around the world. See anything familiar here?

We find in most enterprise software shops, as many as 60% of bugs reported by QA are not accepted or rejected by Development as invalid or "not repeatable." An amazing amount of time is wasted on issue acceptance and defect resolution processes. This is exactly why we came up with LISA Pathfinder, which allows any tester to immediately capture and report an issue with just one "alt-click."

QA teams need to focus on testing functionality, not attempting to make the case to development whether or not a bug actually exists. And Developers need the full transparency of a complete stack trace - not just what the tester saw on the screen, but every single thing happening behind the browser, and repeated in the exact state that reported error condition occurred. We hope you like the video and maybe see a parallel in your own organization!

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.

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.

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

State of the Software Quality Market

Recently read a blog from Gartner analyst Tom Murphy, with some preview metrics from his Magic Quadrant study on Automated Software Quality Suites. In it, Tom points out growth and market share metrics for the 16 or so players remaining in the space. Take a look here:

"The Small Grow - But HP Continues to Dominate"

iTKO gets called out for growth in the article: "iTKO had by far the most successful year cashing in on partner relationships and its relatively complete platform for organizations seeking to take advantage of SOA and Cloud technology platforms."

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.

More About Dev & Test Cloud Environments from the Whiteboard

We're continuing our series of iTKO Chalk Talks about moving Development and Testing environments to the Cloud. In our previous post, John discussed the Challenges of Dev & Test cloud environments. Since there are extremely significant cost savings -- on the order of 95%+ cheaper -- to be gained by provisioning this Pre-Production capacity in Public and Private Clouds (or, "Hybrid Cloud" Environments) it behooves any enterprise IT shop that uses and integrates software to pool resources and use Cloud Computing approaches in this way.

In this Dev & Test Cloud Chalk Talk installment, we'll talk about why and how companies are moving Pre-production aspects of the software lifecycle to cloud environments:

What about the hidden costs of Dev & Test Clouds? Cloud vendors and providers can point out the significant cost advantages of using Private and Public clouds for a given computing resource above, but they leave out continuing costs like MIPS charges, transaction fees, data maintenance, and many other cost aspects that cannot be reduced by moving Pre-production to Cloud environments. We will cover this aspect next.

Employing Virtual Environments for Manual Testers: It Still Doesn't Suck

Here's a brand new article in Virtualization Journal: Employing Virtual Environments for Manual Testers from one of our expert architects, Andy Nguyen.

Here at iTKO, we evangelize virtualizing and automating the entire software development lifecycle. While manual testing is a topic we don't cover as often - Virtualization of Manual Testing labs is a really cool thing that can add a lot of value in any large IT organization. For every development and test automation expert in an enterprise, there can be a whole team of on-site, partner, outsourced and seasonal testers sitting idle - waiting for access to a valid, configured test environment to run their scenarios against.

This article contained a cartoon - you might remember our distant history when we advertised the claim that "Your Testing Sucks" - and nobody ever disagreed with us. So here's the comic by Sal Monella:

Service Virtualization is the best way to solve the above constraint for Larry Lamprey, not buying more hardware or conducting laborious, expensive custom setups of a multi-tier environment behind the UI for testers.

Manual testing is never going to disappear, as someone will always be expected to test application UIs for user experience, etc. However, to eliminate downtime from testing, and conflicts over limited available test environments, ALL testers can use a Virtual Service Environment (VSE) to stay productive. Virtualization of those setups and data scenarios also delivers a huge productivity boost.

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.

Chalk Talks: Validation 101 & 102

For this week's Chalk Talk installment, founder John Michelsen revisits what Validation means to today's modern application lifecycle. It is a crucial part of any well-governed software architecture, one that is still too often neglected, once the project test and release cycle is complete.

This first installment covers the basics of Validation ("Validation 101"):

Next, John talks about how we apply this practice using LISA Validate:

We are always looking for more topics, customer stories and problems we can address, so if you have a question for us to answer in our upcoming Chalk Talks, please comment here or contact us.

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.

iTKO Chalk Talk: Event-Driven SOA

How do you ensure successful delivery today's distributed SOA types of applications, when you don't even know exactly how they are structured? Understanding the challenges of an "Event Driven SOA" model means discovering when and how decoupled applications kick off business processes, and how to validate that the business process is complete as messages cross several technologies.

iTKO Chalk Talk: "Event Driven SOA" (2009, YouTube video 5:57)

iTKO LISA founder and Chief Geek John Michelsen describes how Event-Driven SOA came to be a common architectural pattern in today's modern, distributed business applications, and how testing and validation needs to answer the quality challenges inherent in governing these kinds of apps. Example from the Insurance industry discussed.

Look for more educational and interesting video from iTKO soon. We are getting ready to shoot our next season, so if you have deep questions or topics you'd like use to cover, tell us about it at news[at]itko.com.

iTKO Chalk Talk: What is Validation vs. Testing?

Welcome back to another issue of iTKO Chalk Talk. This episode focuses on the discipline of Validation of complex, distributed integration environments, with an example specifically from one of our Defense partners.

We've mentioned before that the US Government is leading the way in many aspects of IT governance (or SOA Governance) - of which Validation is a key component. With so many mission critical systems to support, Validation means more than just business continuity, in this sense it can mean saving lives both at home, and for the warfighter abroad.

iTKO Chalk Talk: What Does Validation Mean? (5:15, YouTube video)

Software Validation is unique from testing - it deals with the need for business and service level continuity of systems, as opposed to a testing checkpoint that occurs along a software release cycle. Validation is what we need to do to ensure that our systems, once tested and integrated, stay healthy - even as underlying services and customer usage patterns change.

Our LISA Validate solution works with many of the leading tools for IT Governance and operations monitoring, such as SOA Registry/Repositories, ALM platforms, performance dashboards, what have you. Pick a set of tools that works for your environment. In the end, validation is not really about the software, it is about making the commitment to ensure that critical applications have the continuous attention and quality coverage they deserve.

People are Still Testing User Interfaces

So the heyday of UI testing is over as far as enterprise software is concerned, right? In modern apps, the meaningful business logic happens behind the webpage, in the service-to-service integrations that serve up the appropriate dynamic data. Testing the UI is out of fashion.

Well not exactly. While one type of manual UI acceptance testing faltered, we see another kind of UI testing taking its place. As much as it is true that there are an increasing number of connections and activities going on "behind the glass" that must be tested, it never will replace the need for thorough testing of the user experience. Why is this?

Enter RIAs, or Rich Internet Applications. For a while, serious business applications that leveraged the Internet largely treated the web page as a "request interface" - you enter all the information into a form, submit the page, and it makes a request to the web server, which gets the necessary information from the app server after plenty of back-end processing. Due to performance and latency issues, as well as some rather buggy initial "rich UI" approaches over the last 10 years, it was a lot safer to keep the browser-facing functionality rather simple.

Therefore, testing the UI became of diminishing value in web apps. We needed to validate the back-end systems - the messaging queues, business processes and systems of record. A symptom discovered in the UI meant you were very late to the game in testing.

Now the UI is shifting back into balance in the testing world with RIAs. As customers expect easier and ever-richer user experience on the web, development teams (and the community at large) have moved some of the business functionality back into the browser, to allow customers to more interactively make choices. Technologies such as AJAX, Flash/Flex, Java Swing, Silverlight and other tools have replaced some of the buggy and slow web UI tools of the past. REST-style approaches further advanced the architecture of richer functionality in the front-end.

With this change comes a renaissance in the practice of UI testing. As seen here, one RIA screen such as a trading or entertainment portal may look like one web page to the user, but actually represent hundreds or thousands of separate requests to different servers that populate that page with content. A mere user click or mouse-over on the screen can again, represent several calls from the browser for dynamic data to be displayed. And unlike the late 90's, these customers are not going to wait a few seconds to see results. Lagging performance, displayed glitches and inaccuracies will send the user elsewhere in a heartbeat.

• It takes both human insight: "What is a good user experience and is that what I'm seeing as I test?" AND;
• A whole lot of automation: "How can a tester possibly automate the tests I've already done, while remembering to cover all of the dynamic permutations of content that could be displayed in this RIA screen?"

We've been doing a lot of research in this area, and we've posted some new material on LISA Solutions for RIA and Web 2.0 User Interfaces on itko.com, if you are interested in this topic. Customers are bringing UI testing into harmony with service-based testing and validation approaches.

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.

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.

Hitting the right QA Notes with SD Times' Feinman

Recently I had the chance to catch up SD Times' Jeff Feinman for an interview about the latest trends we're seeing in software QA. In the resulting article, "Hitting the Right Notes in QA", Jeff surveyed practically every software testing vendor in the field, from unit-and-code coverage firms to the functional UI types of tool providers.

 The article talks about the importance of metrics and measurement tools that support testing - comparing software testing in today's complex environments to attempting to play a symphony, saying it would be "like a symphony orchestra getting up on a stage without a single sheet of music and trying to play Bach or Beethoven."

The golden rule of software testing - the earlier you find bugs, the less costly they are to fix - was mentioned as the driving force for measuring the value of testing. Cost-per-bug found in development is indeed much cheaper.

Agreed - however there is also the aspect of automation closer to integration time which must happen in these complex environments that must happen - as there are simply too many possible combinations and points of failure in today's distributed and "loosely coupled" environments like SOA. How many aspects of enterprise software are really built from scratch, and how many are reused or re-purposed from existing components.

I wager that going forward in QA, the big challenge in testing is no longer at the code level, or even the user interface -- that isn't where the big chaos is happening, and there are already a number of processes and tools that do that successfully now.

All in all appreciated the perspectives in this industry-wide QA survey.

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.

How to be Fast and Agile with Increasing Services Complexity Without Falling on your Face

Agile development is spreading in the SOA world to rapidly decrease development times, but if testing is not done properly, you might lose all the efficiency gains through having to conduct a massive cleanup effort afterwards. Like building bridges, fix it as you go is a much better approach than fix it later with massive traffic flowing over the structure. InfoWorld's Eric Knorr writes about this in his recent Modernizing IT article, "How to be agile without falling on your face."

Eric reports on a conversation with iTKO’s Derick Townsend. Derick said that companies within an M&A cyclone -- particularly in times of high volatility like we are seeing today in financial services markets -- are desperate to accelerate application development projects.

"They get 80 percent through a project, and they think the end is in sight, but the last 20 percent really stymies them, and that has to do with the test and delivery part. They're dealing with so much complexity. Telcos are experiencing this too. The components and underlying systems are changing constantly underneath," Townsend said.

Eric goes on to write about how iTKO provides what we call Service Virtualization, which is different than traditional hardware virtualization. Instead, iTKO LISA absorbs the behavior of all relevant components, services and data in an extended IT environment and simulates them, This capability allows developers to determine how an application based on those services will behave under various circumstances in the real world. Developers can become more agile using Virtualization practices to support increases in complexity, without a corresponding increase in testing and development risks and cost.  

Pros and Cons of Application Testing in the Cloud

Well it seems we have a series of posts on Cloud Computing and Test environments to cover, as we've been seeing a lot of good background education in our research on the topic.

Jan Stafford recently posted on a conversation with Bernard Golden - author of IT bestseller, Virtualization for Dummies. Bernard is a strong advocate for virtualization and cloud computing technologies, but warned that it requires some new skills and has to be done right. In a brief video he said that application development is one of the areas were the cloud makes a lot of sense.

Bernard provided this example. A firm wanted to test their application and need 100 browser instances. In the old days it would have required 100 machines -- that would be a massive undertaking. Even with hardware virtualization, you would need 5 to 10 machines, and there would be some complex configuration issues. However, by putting it all in the cloud, they were able to sync up 100 virtual instances of the browsers and take them down over a weekend at a dramatic cost reduction.

However, that's just a web UI testing exercise. Bernard added that few development labs actually replicate the exact server and software environment as the target data center that will run the application in production. The cost of that set-up would be astronomical by conventional means, but that is starting to change. With Service Virtualization in a Cloud Environment, you can basically eliminate all of those downstream dependencies from the equation quite inexpensively.

In addition, development in the cloud allows you to scale up and scale down the application for testing of various load sizes without incurring hardware costs. The cloud can support more difficult testing requirements like load testing and scaling that many labs can’t scale to support. Finally, since many applications will be delivered through the cloud, testing them first this way makes sense.

To reap all these benefits, Bernard cautioned that there are several important decision such as finding the right cloud services provider. Software testers will have to acquire some new skills, and development teams have to be careful about integration with internal applications. They will also have to manage application lifecycle in the cloud. Many IT service providers have also made significant strides in delivering improvements in these areas.

Green SOA is Good

We have covered SOA’s role in green IT before on this blog, (see Making IT More Green and Saving Money at the Same Time Through SOA). Loraine Lawson provides an useful addition to the conversation with her post, SOA's Green ROI.

Lorraine sets the stage with the fact that today, over 70 percent of the SOA adoption rationale is business driven, versus only 30 percent in 2006. She adds that technology may never again be the driving force in the corporate decision process, but in SOA, it will always be the implementation mechanism. We have written that with SOA and many other tech efforts, going green and getting a better ROI are interconnected.

Lorraine goes on to cover the opinion of Deborah Grove, a green IT specialist, who has long been of the opinion that SOA is key to the long-term definition of Green IT. “Right now, we are picking up the 'low hanging fruit' by addressing the PUE (power usage effectiveness) of data centers’ power consumption.  However, looking at the entire IT food chain, ensuring that ecosystems of suppliers, partners, and customers are moving to an online collaborative style with less paper and less independent development of customized applications through the use of SOA means that fewer hardware pieces will be needed for dev and app servers.”

I certainly agree and automated testing and virtualization can play a significant role in reducing waste from the IT food chain. Lorraine points out that Verizon Wireless used SOA to green its IT infrastructure, reducing its hardware footprint by 95 percent. The company measured its ROI by reduced tonnage of hardware in the data center. However, the green of virtualization is not limited to hardware, as we have discussed here (see Guide to Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development – Part One of Six.) It is nice to see an increasing awareness of the green potential of SOA.

 

Now is the Time to Get Your SOA House in Order

Joe McKendrick recently wrote about Using Downtime to Boost SOA. He refered to Kleber Bacili, CTO and founder of Sensedia, says "times like these may be the perfect times to get your SOA house in order.”" We certainly agree.

As Kleber said, the "recent 'SOA is Dead' debate has actually rejuvenated interest in service oriented architecture," He adds that if your budget has been tightened, this is a great time to clean up those foundering projects that never quite seem to get traction.

Kleber writes that this clean up can best be done implementing SOA governance initiatives with a well-planned and incremental approach. This allows you to streamline wasteful and unruly SOA projects, eliminating duplicated development through governance practices.

Indeed we can turn the tables on mere cost cutting and generate value here. There is plenty of opportunity to increase customer capture and retention, and deliver increased value by delivering the most critical business functionality faster (and with the quality to call it "delivered").

To do so, you need to validate that each release does indeed meet requirements, or you end up with a mark in the cost column instead. Virtualization of services can also eliminate costs while increasing agility, by eliminating the dependencies that can keep your development teams on the bench waiting for access to live services and incomplete systems from other parties.

Of course, if you do all of the above, your teams won't have any excuse for downtime anymore -- they'll be too busy delivering!