Here is a topic that recently came to my attention that I think has many implications for the success of enterprise 2.0 so I wanted to share it on this forum. Enterprise 2.0 has provided us with many opportunities to more rapidly develop applications drawing from numerous data sources. However, this is both an opportunity and a challenge. The evolution of application development has been extremely aggressive over the past year and a half. What started out as standard base platforms quickly migrated to composite applications through Web 2.0 and SOA. This rapid development with an increasing array of independent data sources that are now inter-connected represents a challenge for software testing and validation to keep up.

There is more opportunity for failure, or at best inefficiency, if validation and testing cannot maintain the required time frames in the faster paced enterprise 2.0. Any enterprise application has to be able to trust the multiple data sources that get mashed up in a composite application but many of these data sources may be outside its reach at the point of origin. iTKO addresses this issue as we shall see.

Last week I spoke with iTKO Founder and Chief Architect John Michelsen on this topic. He mentioned that when enterprise 2.0 apps were out on the fringe in the form of blogs and wikis, the testing issues were not such a big deal. Now that enterprise 2.0 is moving deeper into the enterprise, as we have discussed a good bit on this blog, the stakes are much higher. iTKO’s LISA software helps to mitigate the risks in three ways.

First, it allows companies to re-think the testing strategy. Most software testing has been done manually in the waterfall manner. The enterprise 2.0 world is moving too fast for this. Data can be brought into composition applications without sufficient testing. For example, one of their clients, a top cable provider, operates in a very competitive field. They were limited to two major application platform releases a year simply because of the testing requirements. Much of this testing is now automated through iTKO. The company has reduced six weeks of manual testing to four machine hours. They are now able to provide new functionality at a faster pace.

Secondly, iTKO helps with ongoing validation of data and the underlying business logic. Since data coming in through composite applications can change without notice, ongoing validation becomes more important. Using the same approach as it does with testing, iTKO can provide continuous validation. For example, a government agency that runs highly sensitive data from multiple sources, has iTKO re-validate it every 30 seconds. It does business logic testing by putting sample business problems into play and making sure the correct responses occur.

Thirdly, iTKO has LISA Virtual Service Environment (VSE) to simulate the real world for testing and validation when test systems are not available and testing cannot be done on production systems. For example, a major travel site had a significant performance downgrade. Virtualization enabled them to test outside the production system, discover the information source that lead to the downgrade, and correct it. To go offline to find this issue would have been impossible. In another example, a bank had only limited access to production systems for testing new functionality. The virtual version gave them unlimited access.

LISA VSE also allows you to test against applications that are not even built yet. If you know what it is going to be, they can create a virtual model for testing. This allows rapid innovation as you can see some of the potential problems before they occur. A major airline is using iTKO’s virtualization of services to increase the pace of development for their next generation, composite application-based platform. In this case they will obtaining data from their many travel partner’s applications such as hotel rewards systems and rental car platforms. Now they can test all the connections before they even occur through iTKO’s virtualization services. The use of composite applications is greatly streamlining the implementation of their next generation system. Services from iTKO allow testing and validation to keep up with this accelerated pace of development derived from enterprise 2.0. iTKO uses the term SOV or services oriented validation as a complement to SOA. It refers to the strategy of simulating the behavior of deployed software assets, and the synthetic construction of those services not in existence, that make up an enterprise SOA application.

I used to develop technology-enabled software training in the 80s and I can appreciate the need for such a service. It was very hard to develop training until it was too late because we could not see what they systems would look like and function until a few weeks before the training was needed. This virtualization should also enhance training development and provisioning training environments.

There is more on their web site including white papers, research reports, and forums. They also offer a blog, the iTKO SOA Testing & Validation Soapbox, which covers SOA testing, validation and virtualization, software quality, automated testing, and IT governance issues with John Michelsen and other iTKO executives.