Testing Times for SOA

The promised benefits of SOA-based deployments have dominated the IT agenda in recent months with companies as diverse as the Met Office and the BBC announcing they are laying the foundations for the standards-based framework.

Certainly, the ever-expanding capabilities of the SOA framework - offering a common way for services to communicate with each other - looks set to revolutionise enterprise architecture. Yet only by implementing a comprehensive testing process can companies ensure their SOA is robust and secure enough to form the basis of their IT infrastructure.

What are the options for testers? While SOA, from an architect’s perspective, offers huge advantages in terms of operability, flexibility and functionality, for the tester it could spell significant challenges. By definition, SOA projects will always require a testing tool as there is no human interaction with the different components; encoded messages will interface with other applications but not with end users.

The alternatives are to build a testing solution for SOA in-house or to purchase one.

Traditionally, SOA testing has been developed in-house; which begs the question: why are developers spending valuable time on developing new code for testing when a product can be purchased? The burden on developers to create and maintain another deliverable with another group of users simply adds to their task. For developers weighed down by heavy schedules, writing code for testers, or an ad hoc program, is likely to come at the end of process, which contributes further delays to the project. Features in the testing program can lag behind those required by the testers, introducing yet more delays. All this can translate to spiralling costs. And, as the number of services grows and more development is carried out, the risk for companies heightens; if a developer leaves an organisation they take the knowledge with them.

Moreover, if a development team is devoting time to creating new pieces of code then they are being taken away from adding value to the business.

A structured approach to design, development and testing is obviously a necessity if teams are to avoid expensive changes once development is under way. With traditional development, developers often create their own tests, which is fine as they tend to be the users of the code they create. With SOA, however, services will often be developed by other people, other teams, or even other organisations. If a developer writes their own tests here, systematic errors can be introduced which will de-rail integration efforts when the project reaches that stage.

In the past, commercial testing tools have been limited to testing GUIs, or helping to test low-level code. The good news is that independent products are now available which test both sides of the interface and can help to eliminate these costly problems. GH Tester, from Green Hat, is the industry leader now being used by enlightened organisations from Global500 companies to local authorities.

However, it seems that the majority of teams are not aware that such a cost-effective, commercial solution exists for their problem. In fact, a recent survey of senior IT professionals revealed that only 25% are aware of the availability of specialist testing tools yet as many as 90% claimed that inadequate testing is a major impediment to successful delivery of SOA projects.

GH Tester has heralded a new era in testing. Before the arrival of specialist products, testers had to wait until all services were completed and connected to test the interactions between them, but the new software allows users to simulate missing services and interactions, which prevents problems and saves valuable time when integrating.

GH Tester has been created using real experiences from real projects, with the key aim of eliminating nasty surprises at integration time. It not only reduces implementation time significantly but also enables developers to concentrate on their core function: solving real business issues.

In terms of usability, time savings and practicality a specialist tool will far outweigh an in-house developed solution: for example, in-house development often lacks Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and certainly cannot offer the usability and rich GUI features of a commercial product; in-house developed tools are unlikely to copy-and-paste, drag and drop.

Another likely drawback of in-house development is that it is likely to be vendor specific. The new breed of specialist SOA software can test many vendors’ systems, allowing your testing team to develop a standard set of skills to test different systems.

Notwithstanding, there are several considerations when making the switch from an in-house product to a commercial one. There may be a migration and education issue; however the use of XML, or clever migration aids such as regression wizards, can help here if there are a large number of tests to be converted.

It’s also vital to choose a suitable time to adopt a new solution. Mostly this will be when going through a technology change, for example when adopting a JMS implementation from an old middleware solution, or when embarking on a new phase of a project.

Get the timing right, though, and the results of a bought solution will pay dividends in the short and long term.

So as we rush forward into an era of more widespread adoption of SOA, IT managers, CIOs, and developers should consider the benefits of specialist testing tools to save costs, reduce time and ensure SOA delivers on its promise.

Peter Cole is CTO of Green Hat, providers of GH Tester, the industry-leading specialist testing software for integration and SOA technologies. You can download Green Hat software for free evaluation - click here.

Testing tools are vital to SOA success - survey results

Nine out of ten integrators struggle with major problems that Green Hat’s GH Tester is designed to solve - yet only a quarter are aware that such an ingenious tool is available, a recent survey reveals.

The survey shows that low awareness and under-use of specialist testing tools are causing serious delays and problems for UK organisations in delivering the promised benefits of Service Oriented Architectures.

Nine out of ten survey respondents agreed that inadequate testing is a major issue in delivering successful SOA projects using messaging middleware. Over 80% said that the lack of performance testing contributes significantly to run-time issues, and that the lack of specialist testing tools contributes to project delays. Yet only 25% were aware that such software is available.

"Our customers use GH Tester to cut the time, cost and pain of SOA and distributed systems integration dramatically," says Green Hat’s Peter Cole. "It’s clear we have to let more people know!"

The late delivery of individual system components is a major cause of delay for 82% of respondents; over 90% agreed that integration problems are common when components are brought together for the first time. 89% said a product that mimicked these components would help project delivery. GH Tester simulates missing components to allow testing during design and build, so problems can be dealt with before run-time.

Almost two thirds said that adoption of SOA/distributed system testing software is hindered by lack of integration with test management tools used by their organisation. GH Tester integrates with Mercury and Compuware test management suites.

Over 200 UK IT managers, software engineers, application developers and project leaders responded to the 2006 survey.