Testing Software AG/WebMethods-powered Integration, Business Process and SOA applications Enterprises adopt the Software AG suite to accelerate the development and alignment of IT around the core processes of the business. But whether you are approaching Software AG (webMethods) solutions as an enterprise integration challenge, or using the company's IT governance platform, CentraSite, as a way to embark on an SOA strategy, quality is essential from the start. CA's DevTest Framework includes CA Service Virtualization and CA Application Test and offers Software AG (webMethods) customers a no-code way to test, validate and virtualize every layer and every phase of Software AG implementations - at design time, run time and change time - ensuring trust in your critical business applications.
Ensuring Quality and Agility for webMethods Customers
The possibilities for deploying Software AG (webMethods) solutions for enterprise application integration (EAI), or as an enabler for SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) initiatives, are as limitless as the ways a company can configure its business processes. But one aspect that all Software AG (webMethods) customers share is a need to integrate heterogeneous technology assets - from legacy apps to newer technologies - to build a larger business context. Conventional testing methodologies can be both costly, and ineffective in these environments.
Why is achieving test automation so critical in Software AG (webMethods) integrations?
- High cost and effort of test creation and maintenance. Conventional UI-oriented and unit test coding approaches take a procedural approach that results in brittle tests that are invalidated by dynamic change in the system.
- Lack of complete validation of the business workflow. Many testing tools oversimplify the approach for messaging and BPM workflow testing to only component testing at a single endpoint or messaging technology type.
- Quality must maintain a business context across multiple layers of the application. In order to validate that a business requirement is met, integration testing must not skip verification of any of the layers in the architecture, whether these layers are newly integrated, or under the authority of a third party.
- Inability to test at every stage of the application lifecycle. Testing as an "acceptance" phase or event prior to deployment can no longer provide sufficient coverage for a constantly changing, heterogeneous application structure. Quality must be a continuous part of design, development, build and deployment in order to ensure trust in the application.
- Constraints due to unavailable or "not yet ready" services and components limits agility and lengthens delivery times for needed functionality. Virtualization of these components is needed to enable distributed teams to design and deliver functionality in parallel.
Benefits
- CA’s DevTest framework is a comprehensive automated testing, validation and virtualization tool built from the ground up for SOA and composite application integration. If your integration strategy relies on SAG solutions, CA Application Test's declarative, no-code testing approach offers a compelling solution for maximizing delivered quality and minimizing business risk.
- Native integration with CentraSite Active SOA. Out of the box, DevTest directly interacts with SoftwareAG's CentraSite platform, providing an immediate reference point for adding Quality to your overall Service Management and SOA Governance efforts. The ability to validate Policies - and SOA endpoints - both at a management and an implementation level with CA Application Test, ensures reliability and Trust that the system will work as defined.
- Built for messaging standards. CA Application Test can talk and listen to webMethods Broker messaging layers, as well as most known JMS/MQ frameworks. As many implementations must integrate with - or migrate functionality from - other systems, teams using CA Application Test can get a wealth of reusable test cases and accompanying validation of the asynchronous messaging environment over time.
- BPM Process-aware functional and load testing and verification. Break the code-compile-run-curse cycle. CA Application Test is no-code automated testing that normalizes your integration layers into a common, point-and-click test interface, allowing developers and business stakeholders to validate software in business process terms. Tests are highly reusable as orchestrated validation suites. CA Application Test extends the value of these efforts to performance testing activities, to verify that scalability or latency issues do not appear in production.
- Multiple integrated systems. CA Application Test is pure Java, and natively tests Java objects, EJBs, RMI, JMS queues, JDBC databases, as well as web services (WSDL/SOAP) and file systems. As you should expect, CA Application Test runs on any Java-ready client (Unix/Linux/Solaris, Win, OSX) and can easily test any server that routes JMS. CA Application Test provides live interaction and deep testing of any applications assembled using SoftwareAG integration platforms.
Features of CA Application Test for Software AG
- Make live assertions against available services and implementation layers in SAG and webMethods-based integrations, both for business functionality, SLA validation, and as load and performance testing for IT Operations activities.
- Create and/or assume temporary Broker JMS Queues and Topics to snoop through the entire life cycle of a message as it moves from message handler to message handler. Validate every layer of SOA or composite apps, ensuring web services, HTTP, Broker, and JMS endpoints are receiving/sending the appropriate message payloads at a unit level, or as part of the same test workflow.
- Ensure integrity of migrations by validating file systems and transferred data within any JDBC data source. No need to program test clients and maintain fragile test scripts. Developers and QA teams stay engaged in testing throughout the application lifecycle with a high level of test automation and reuse. Business process owners can utilize CA Application Test's subprocesses to understand the validity of a process - even if they do not know exactly what components are tested.
- Rich test metrics and feedback (SNMP and others) from webMethods Optimize, with monitoring and alerting to report boundary or failure conditions within Integration Server or Broker.
- Virtualize dependent components with CA Service Virtualization across all technology layers within the SoftwareAG implementation, including Web Services, messaging services, data sources and underlying systems, allowing 24/7 availability of a valid environment for testing and validation for parallel development and integration.
- Create a baseline test from a set of transactions in the using the Application Insight functionality.
DevTest for Software AG/webMethods - Testing, Validation and Virtualization Across the Platform
CA Application Test coverage for Software AG integration efforts.
CA Application Test provides teams with a 360-degree view of the quality and reliability of the application, and its underlying implementation layers, throughout its lifecycle at design time, run time, and change time.
Extending quality within your implementation process
The partnership of CA’s DevTest and Software AG extends beyond software, because an SOA strategy isn't something you buy, it is something you do. Best practices for Lifecycle Quality using CA Application Test fits within Software AG's best practice methodologies, and the end result is increased reliability and reduced cost and implementation risk.
In addition, enterprise applications will always contain some legacy or custom functionality that needs to be tested in order to fully validate a business process. CA Application Test Trace Kit's integration abilities let developers "test enable" software. Test Runner lets you incorporate tests into a continuous build workflow. Or, use Test Runner with JUnit to run standard JUnit tests in Ant or some other build tool. The whole team can get rich metrics and debugging information on applications behind the scenes.