Virtualizing the Development Life Cycle - Software Development Times On The Web

Virtualizing the Development Life Cycle
iTKO applies virtualization to services
By David Worthington

December 15, 2007 — Virtualization continues its inexorable march into the software development department. The latest application: letting dev teams work in parallel.

That’s what’s being offered by LISA Virtual Service Environment, a new solution from iTKO.

According to the company, LISA VSE virtual services are constructed synthetically from WSDL models or are modeled after existing services and other underlying services such as databases, enterprise service buses or Java objects. Virtual endpoints define virtual locations for services that need to be invoked.

Aside from lowering the number of test beds, reducing licensing costs and contention on hardware, iTKO says that the LISA VSE lets teams validate SOA implementations across heterogeneous technologies as opposed to developing a selected service or middleware layer in isolation.

iTKO coined the term service-oriented virtualization at a mid-November conference at which it offered the strategy behind the release of LISA version 4.0 in October. LISA is iTKO’s SOA testing framework.

A virtualized services environment is a “big thing” and virtualization is the “wave to follow,” remarked Theresa Lanowitz, founder of analyst firm Voke. “What you see is most people are talking about virtualization from [the] point of view [of] data center and server consolidation…saving energy, resources, space, etc. What iTKO is doing is a unique offering that takes it a step further. The virtualized service environment will allow decoupling of development and testing teams from dependency on deployed services.”

Lanowitz added that accuracy is key. “iTKO is doing heavy lifting around services. With LISA you can do introspection on characteristics [of the service’s behavior]—not just playback. It’s real in how you test against services.”

Chris Kraus, product manager at iTKO, said that more protocols will be supported with each new version of VSE to drive toward interoperability within the test bed. He added that future releases of LISA would tie into the governance life cycle and have further automation of modeling and testing, to facilitate provisioning the environment around the application.

Lanowitz predicted that virtualization will continue to move up the stack in testing. “The cost and time savings are immediate; this is a new paradigm for development and testing,” she said. “We are seeing the early effects of virtualization in the application life cycle. It will be a huge part in the next 24 months. Call it Application Life Cycle 2.0.”

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