iTKO LISA 4 Release Revolutionizes SOA Quality with Virtualized Services and Business Process Testing Features
Tuesday 13 November 2007LISA's Evolution Mitigates IT Risk through SOA Testing, Integration Support and Policy Validation
iTKO, Inc., the leading provider of testing solutions for SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) software, announced the availability of the new version of its flagship product suite, iTKO LISA 4 SOA Testing and Validation. LISA expands upon iTKO's delivery of the Three C's of testing - complete, collaborative and continuous - by adding key functionalities that mitigate the business risk of ever-increasing change and complexity in enterprise IT.
Companies are rapidly adopting SOA approaches in order to benefit from increased business agility and IT cost benefits. Services-based functionality has become easier to deploy and reuse across business applications. However, concerns about quality have increased due to the risks of increased change and complexity in the interconnected technology layers that make up SOA applications. LISA 4 addresses these concerns by offering an automated risk mitigation testing environment for SOA applications. LISA 4 allows the entire team to create, manage, and orchestrate tests continuously, throughout design, development and deployment, in order to prevent costly application failures and errors.
""The testing and validation of a set of policies and processes are critical because they can often conflict with one another," said analyst L. Frank Kenney of Gartner, Inc. "Because of the loose coupling nature of SOA, the dynamic validation of configurations or dependencies during deployment cycles will become a necessity."
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The new iTKO LISA 4 SOA Testing suite includes the following new features:
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Virtual Service Environment: LISA Virtual Service Environment (VSE) represents a sea change in services-based design, testing and development, enabling distributed teams to deliver SOA applications in an agile, test-driven way. LISA's VSE delivers significant cost and agility benefits, by capturing and virtualizing the behaviors of services, and their underlying implementation and data layers, so development and testing is freed from the burden of deploying and supporting complex test environments.
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RIA Testing: LISA's new RIA testing features span both the implementation layers where data and business logic resides, and the new "Web 2.0" oriented patterns of development which are becoming popular in rich browser-based application delivery models such as SaaS, AJAX and mashups. LISA provides no-code test capture, management and dynamic staging and playback of functional and performance tests for DOM-level browser simulation, AJAX, Swing (Applet) and AWT element testing as a key part of ensuring quality for SOA applications.
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Dynamic Load Testing: Industry-leading load testing automation, execution and reporting for simulating high-volume, complex user behaviors against every layer of SOA applications. LISA 4 enables users to define sophisticated load patterns, and offers a Load Pacing Optimizer which intelligently simulates load over time periods, with a new intuitive test data input management and reporting framework.
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Business Process Assurance: For business stakeholders, LISA 4 provides the ability to abstract the process of directly testing against technologies, to validate business processes in a highly reusable, modular way LISA natively imports and models test cases from leading BPM (Business Process Management) platforms such as webMethods Integration Server and Broker, TIBCO BusinessWorks and ActiveMatrix, Sun JCAPS, SeeBeyond, Fuego, Lombardi and others.
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Enhanced SOA Platform Support: LISA natively tests against every access point of ESB systems in ways that no other solution can, including JMS messages, Web Services, or connection databases. LISA provides out-of-the-box support for IBM MQ-Series, TIBCO, webMethods, Oracle FUSION, BEA AquaLogic, Sun JCAPS, Sonic MQ, Fiorano and other leading ESB/integration providers. In addition, LISA interoperates with commonly used UDDI Type 2 and 3 SOA registries and SOA repositories to look up and test services endpoints.
""Since SOA services are late binding by nature - with services coming together in production to deliver their combined functionality, business teams often give up on test automation - and only "acceptance test" against live applications, when they are available," said John Michelsen, founder and Chief Scientist, iTKO. "The risk reduction and productivity value created for our customers through use of LISA 4's new virtualization, process and governance capabilities will be significant."
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The advances included in LISA 4 provide the enterprise with a verifiable, enforceable way to validate that SOA Policies and service levels are being reliably met, as a key part of SOA Governance. The new LISA features are delivered as a singularly developed application suite from iTKO, released for General Availability on September 30, 2007. Many of the new features are already in use at several iTKO customer sites.