SOA - Integration Industry Pulse

SOA makes some things easier, like making changes to business processes, and adding new functionality. And it makes some things harder, like QA. The problem is that it’s not longer sufficient to test all the user interfaces – you also have to test what happens once you push the submit button and the packet goes through all the underlying layers of the SOA.

The Solstice Integra Suite focuses testing all the layers, including orchestration, enterprise services, enterprise components, and message level transports, of an SOA. To accomplish all this requires the ability to support all the underlying protocols, and languages. This is something you don’t want to have to hand code. Solstice supports regression and unit level testing, web service testing, and end to end testing. It has the ability to validate the business processes. To validate the end-to-end process it includes recording technology to instrument processes as they execute. Solstice gives you the ability to view the message content itself as it passes through the distributed SOA infrastructure. Solstice also includes simulation capabilities so you can do proactive testing when not all systems are available.

Solstice also allows you to validate file and database updates, and run history and report. Solstice provides integration with Mercury, JUnit and ANT, just in case you need to enhance what you already have in-house for QA to deal with the complexities of SOA. According to Solstice, some customers, particularly those with complex environments, have seen 100% ROI within 6 months. Software that pays for itself is always impressive.