Identifying your existing application architecture is not for the faint of heart. Most applications have had multiple iterations and various owners over time causing a likely disconnect between what we think is happening behind the UI and what actually exists. With the inevitable people turnover and various app updates, it is easy to lose sight of the truth of your application.
In its current iteration, CA Path Finder enables you to capture transactions from pre-production applications and turn that detail into virtual services and baseline tests. That’s the end result; or is it? In order to create these baselines, CA Path Finder discovers and maps existing business workflows helping to identify complex architecture and performance bottlenecks. Here-in lies the key to the ability for Dev, Test and Ops to work more closely together – a single source of the truth perhaps. The answer to what lies behind my UI or API, not in just the transactions and data but where those transactions start from and where they end. Their path.
When asked, customers told us they are recording up to 50,000 transactions a day across 30 different application servers. That’s a lot of data, so how do you make that data valuable? It’s not just generating a virtual service or a baseline test. We believe the key is to turn the data into insight. Make it an asset for users; something that can be documented, shared, annotated, navigated and filtered to enable clarity between teams on what is the real truth behind an application.
What I assert is the value in CA Path Finder is not the automation it offers but more the documentation and insight it delivers. Imagine being able to quickly search through a sea of 100,000 transactions to find the ones that are important to your API testing and then using them to generate tests and virtual services. Now that’s both insight and automation making your job as an Automation Engineer a walk in the park!
This is exactly what we imagined while developing the next major release of CA Path Finder that we will show at CA World 2014. We can’t wait to share with you the details. If you’d like this insight today, join our DevTest Customer Validation program or join us for our CA World pre-conference sessions and floor demos showing what the new CA Path Finder has to offer.