Big. Incredible. Amazaing. These are just a few words I overheard last week at CA World when customers heard about all our development and test solutions, as well as the new features and benefits in our DevTest 9.0 release. (Note: DevTest = Service Virtualization, Continuous Application Insight, and Application Test … along with Test Data Manager and Test Case Optimizer from Grid-tools) all designed to help our customers IGNITE CONTINUOUS DELIVERY.
There are many point continuous delivery options and products on the marketplace. But no one has the breadth and depth of continuous delivery solutions that help you accelerate application development and eliminate development and testing barriers.
There are 3 focus areas that we’ve been creating the DevTest production solutions around:
- Developer Speed: Development teams are under constant pressure to build and release applications quickly and with fewer errors.
- Agile Testing Trifecta: QA/Test teams struggle to improve their test processes. Right now the test process is very ad hoc, with test cases and test data being manually created. It’s a very tedious process and can introduce errors and confusion into the test process. CA addresses the testing challenge with our testing trifecta of tools to improve: 1) test automation, 2) test data creation and 3) test constraint removal.
- Igniting DevOps: If you see the value in Service Virtualization or our other automated testing and test data solutions, we now are focused on helping you share what you’ve discovered with others in your organization. Upcoming roadshows and a new Hero Kit will help you expand adoption.
In this blog post, I want to focus on the first of the three focus areas listed above: Developer Speed.
Developer S.P.E.E.D
There is tremendous pressure in today’s market place to deliver apps faster to both meet insatiable consumer demand and to stay ahead of the competition. Microservices are becoming more commonplace in order to quickly get apps to market. Microservices are the shiny new developer tool to help deliver software faster. The growth and interest in microservices is real. Microservices can be thought of as single-purpose applications that collaborate using APIs to deliver services. These small services can then collaborate with other microservices on the same server. Even internal development teams can interact with microservices through APIs. When changes need to happen, you don’t need to rewrite the entire application. Instead, you can add new features/code pushed as microservices, and plug them into the existing application.
But in our haste to meet speed, we absolutely cannot let quality slip. Too often, testing is squeezed out of the delivery equation because of the need to get an update out the door. No wonder then that a recent Gatepoint research showed that 87% of respondents rate “loss of customer satisfaction” as potentially the most critical issue stemming from flubbed application delivery.
And that can’t happen on your watch. Dimensional research showed that 86% of consumers buying decisions were influenced by negative online reviews. Any focus on speed, without quality, will result is what I call Continuous Delivery suicide.
The main theme for CA Service Virtualization 9.0 is enable both Speed and Quality of application delivery across the enterprise, with a push to make adoption of SV easier. Our whole focus with 9.0 has been S.P.E.E.D. … SV Promise of Exceptional Expedited Development.
Let’s talk about how we are delivering this.
Service Virtualization on Demand
Perhaps the news with the most excitement around it is Service Virtualization on Demand. Besides all the great ways the product management and engineering teams have implemented simplicity and ease of use around using CA Service Virtualization (stay tuned, I’m taking about those later), is the simplicity now of actually trying it, tasting it for the first time. Announced this week is our partnership with Microsoft to offer a full-fledged Service Virtualization solution on the Azure Marketplace.
Folks, this is cool. And it’s available today!
Now, you can experience all the benefits of Service Virtualization on your terms. SV on Azure gives you:
- A fully installed & licensed CA Service Virtualization running on-demand
- The ability to experience SV charged on hourly basis for use of the virtual machine + CA SV. We’re talkin’ like $6.85/hr!! Easy!
- Support for hosting by Azure and product issues directed to CA Support (Communities, Documentation & Support Online)
In addition, SV via Azure gives you a 30-day free trial. Check it out first without paying anything, then go from there. With all the amazing customers leveraging CA Service Virtualization to accelerate application development and instill high-quality, and now with they easy way to try it out, there is no excuse to see how it can best work for you.
SV Meets Microservices Speed
Microservices are all the rage around speeding new releases to market. But, they’ve just increased complexity 10 fold. All these microservices are dependent on each other. How do you test to make sure the full service, which could depend on dozens of microservices, delivers the experience your customers expect? These complexities and dependencies are the antithesis to speed. Developers don’t have time to wait in a DevOps shop that must continuously be delivering software and doing so with paramount quality.
Many organizations are using Service Virtualization to virtualize these microservices to test transactions end to end. Now, CA Service Virtualization 9.0 supports Microservices driven standards like SWAGGER 2.0 and RabbitMQ.
Additionally, SV/AppTest/CAI 9.0 can be deployed on a Docker container. This means your can easily transfer the goodness of SV across multiple deployments/microservices. Now, licensing of SV shouldn’t be a constraint to working with Microservices. With Docker Containers packaging up the OS and application in a single bundle, you can easily run dev-test solutions from CA Technologies on any infrastructure or any cloud that Docker supports.
More 9.0 Goodness for Speed & Quality
- Data Driven Virtual Services (DDVS) lowers the technical bar so that anyone can create a virtual service. DDVS lets users work in excel and enter business data to create virtual services that do not exist in the real world.
- Virtual Service Monitor provides a single pane of glass view for administrators and users to manage, take action, monitor and troubleshoot.
- Advanced Access Controls eases enterprise adoption by mapping access control to customers existing LDAP hierarchy.
- Advanced Virtual Service Editing gives users the power to mock out positive and negative test scenarios providing predictive testing of systems before getting to production.
How to TurboCharge Service Virtualization with CAI
Don't forget, Continuous Application Insight 9.0 was part of this launch as well. Think of this as regression and API testing reinvented. Architectural complexity, lack of transaction details, inadequate documentation causes inefficient development and testing. CA Continuous Application Insight (CAI) provides end-to-end deep transaction discovery that gives visibility into components and their dependencies. CAI then automatically creates accurate test beds and production-like virtual services. New in CAI 9.0 is a feature called "Deep Validation" to invoke and verify (patent applied) to automatically generate API tests in seconds to invoke business logic and verify a system of record is updated.
A large insurance company was part of the beta test program for this feature. They were able to automatically generate 300-600 test cases a day, and get up to 90% test coverage ... up from 25% test coverage! That is huge!
Coming soon...
On the next blog, I’ll talk about how all this focus on shorten time to market means new, more agile testing tools are needed to help ensure superior quality.
Also, don’t forget to attend the DevTest community call tomorrow, Nov 24th. With so many good things happening in the new release, you can’t afford to miss it - https://communities.ca.com/events/2393.