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September 03, 2007
iTKO LISA Adds SOA Load Testing Features
DALLAS, Aug. 30 -- iTKO Inc., a leading provider of testing solutions for integration and service-oriented architecture (SOA) software, announced new functionality for LISA SOA testing that brings the best practices for load and performance testing to the highly distributed and heterogeneous world of SOA applications.
“Over the last year since releasing LISA 3.5, we’ve put a lot of focus on the load testing aspects of LISA, and you will see this reflected in our new version of the software,” said John Michelsen, founder and chief architect of iTKO. “Customers appreciated our ability to efficiently test every technology layer beyond the Web interface, as a collaborative, no-code workflow, and on a continuous basis. These new features automate many of the aspects of load test creation, staging and feedback that our customers demand.”
The new load testing features of LISA include:
- Load patterns: Several new patterns for simulating variable and graduated levels of user traffic and load have been added, so testers no longer need to manually enter load profiles or settle for merely ramping up, and ramping down the simulated users. With LISA, thousands of users can now be precisely modeled (added and removed) without coding, according to stairstep, random, data-driven, or other algorithms over 10 minutes, or 10 day intervals and patterns.
- Simulation patterns: Unique to LISA is the ability to run highly distributed load test simulations and patterns from multiple servers or locations, whether the simulated load comes from local, on-network or remote third-party systems and Services accessed over the Internet.
- Test case pacing: Since LISA generates very efficient load for its overhead, customers asked for easier ways to pace the transactions of a test case to allow for variable “user think time” or steadily distribute them over a time period. While this functionality was already available in LISA, it is now dynamically paced in a much simpler automated fashion, giving testers the feel of “acceptance testing” with high load and efficiency possibilities.
- Aggregate steps: Typical test case tools require manual test case coding to inject any test variables that must change within a captured test script. With LISA, test steps can now be aggregated into reporting groups, increasing the significance of test workflows that match the business processes, instead of simply reporting details of the components under test.
- Test synchronization: LISA 3.5 offered Load Optimization, so testers can have LISA exercise the system under test, and find the thresholds for optimal performance and failure. Now LISA can be massively threaded to verifiably launch all of its test users in the same instant, even across different tests, so they all launch at the same point without any time gap.
- Report data modeling: Adds significant new abilities to generate reports, and then export, manage and leverage test data from extremely long and/or complex test suites by interacting with databases.
Users of conventional client-server testing tools may be familiar with some of these abilities for testing desktop applications on multiple computer screens. However, a key difference is that LISA was not adapted to test services from a point-and-click UI testing tool.
“SOA load testing is a very different task than conventional software load testing on the client,” said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, an SOA analyst firm. “As such, SOA testing deserves its own toolset that can invoke and verify functionality at every layer of the architecture, and do so at load, throughout the design, change and runtime phases.”
Since LISA offers direct functional and performance validation of every component of SOA applications, with or without a UI present, load testing is no longer limited to the client interface, or the number of instances of Windows computers running on a given network. LISA load tests also leverage the end-to-end functional tests created in LISA, invoking and verifying at every tier of the architecture, with a very low system footprint required, so capacity can be simulated at the lowest possible effort and cost.
About iTKO
iTKO Inc. offers the most complete software framework for testing service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications, allowing multiple business technology layers to be exercised within a single test case. iTKO's mission is to allow everyone involved in IT to own complete, collaborative and continuous software quality, from development, to QA and business analysts. iTKO LISA Complete SOA Testing Framework performs unit, functional, regression, load and performance tests, without requiring test coding or script maintenance. Founded in 1999, the Dallas-based company's customers include Sun, Citigroup, Capgemini, AMD, TIBCO and i2. www.itko.com
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Source: iTKO-----
Source: iTKO
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