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Lisa Dresses Up for Continuous Testing


iTKO tool upgrade now features dashboard for metrics, configurable notification

By David Rubinstein
October 1, 2006 — 
In a services world, organizations build their applications using externally created and managed components that change without their notice or approval, or that stop being upgraded, or that have unseen dependencies that can break an application.

Or, even within one company, there could be a mandate that it no longer is acceptable for each unit to maintain software similar to that being used and maintained in a different unit. Suddenly, one group is forced to face the problem of depending on software that other people manage and control.

So, an organization might deploy its application only once per year, but a Web services component of that app might be updated six times during the year. This creates testing issues for the organization releasing the application.

Into this scenario comes iTKO, which is defining a practice it calls continuous testing. “Testing is no longer an event along a static life cycle,” said iTKO founder and chief architect John Michelsen.

Michelsen said the “five nines” of application availability is actually a product of system uptime, application availability and—from a business perspective—functional integrity. The first two, he noted, can pretty much be automated to ensure uptime. The last one, though, is as critical to business as the first two. “Apps had better deliver the business functionality, or it’s downtime,” Michelsen said.

iTKO is expected on Oct. 2 to release version 3.5 of its Lisa automated testing platform, with more emphasis on managing continuous testing. New dashboard functionality has been built in so users can schedule tests, set, record and analyze pass/fail metrics and get other application data in a customizable format that makes the data most useful.

NOTICE OF FAILURE
Lisa 3.5 also now provides configurable “on failure” notification. “In a continuous [testing] service, various people need to be notified,” Michelsen explained. A functional test, for example, might fail, in which case both the developer and the business analyst who wrote the requirement would be notified.

A key to this kind of testing is to do the tests on the entire deployed application, Michelsen noted. “Usually you just test your piece of the app, not the whole millions-of-lines-of-code app,” he said. But with applications built from services, which are changing all the time, the application has to be checked at runtime to ensure business

continuity and functional integrity, he maintained. “Now,” Michelsen said, “it’s important to associate between the [application] staging and runtime areas. You must ensure functional integrity at runtime.”


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