News

iTKO Enhances SOA Continuous Testing Service

• By Kathleen Richards
• October 2, 2006

Dallas-based iTKO is releasing an upgrade to its SOA testing platform this week. The LISA 3.5 Complete SOA Test Platform is a Java-based toolset designed to automate testing without requiring any coding. In addition to unit and functional testing, it supports regression, load-testing, integration and monitoring across business logic and service layers.

"With the 3.5 release, we have pushed the limits of continuous [testing] out into what we consider a fairly unique space," says Jim Mackay, chief marketing, officer. "We allow you now to be able to identify tests or test suites with running pieces of an application, such as a service or a suite of components within a service and to be able to periodically invoke those to ensure that you have maintained functional integrity of your components."

In addition, he says, when a new service is about to come online, you can invoke these tests against that service to be sure that you didn't break anything since the last iteration of that service.

The LISA 3.5 platform is one product with one set of tests (although there are numerous LISA Editions)that can be used by the various roles within the development lifecycle—developers, QA technicians, business analysts, tech support people. Version 3.5 builds on the platform's continuous testing service, by enhancing the identification, escalation and reporting of granular problems during testing and monitoring of services and business workflows. "What we've really focused on is being able to bundle those up and making it easy to manage [those tests] for all the people who are involved in that lifecycle," says Mackay.

LISA, which stands for Load-bearing Internet-based Simulator Application, evolved out of the distributed and composite applications realm. "A lot of what we do with growth and testing capabilities is based on the ability to do simulation and that's critical when you start to get into how do you distribute applications; you simulate a component talking to an application or simulate an application talking to a component," says Mackay. The iTKO cofounders used the technology in their consulting practice and decided to commercialize it in 2003. Today, probably 80 percent of iTKO's customers, which include Sun, CapGemini, AMD and TIBCO, use it for SOA testing, according to Mackay.

"A lot of people confuse Web services testing with SOA testing," he says. "Your ability to go off and introspect and invoke things with SOAP and WSDL, that's a great start, but you need to get visibility into the roundtrip of an event within your application, which goes way beyond Web services testing, so the notion of being able to test the different technologies at a native level is important."

LISA 3.5 is available now. The test suite functions as a complete workstation, according to iTKO, and also works with the LISA Load & Performance Server, the LISA Continuous Testing Service, and the LISA Extension Kit. Licensing for the Lisa 3.5 Complete SOA Test Platform ranges from $3,000, to $10,000 per seat for an enterprise edition. Find out more about this technology and the LISA Editions.