The need for specialized testing, management and governance products is becoming more apparent as enterprises get deeper into their service-oriented architecture efforts. The latest vendor to address the gap is Mercury Interactive, which this week is expected to detail a series of new and upgraded products aimed at helping companies keep their SOA projects successful.
At its Mercury World user conference going on in Las Vegas, the software maker will launch two new SOA testing products as well as a new version of Systinet 2, the SOA governance platform Mercury gained in its $105 million acquisition of Systinet earlier this year.
The two new products are Mercury Service Test and Mercury Service Test Management. Based on Mercury’s LoadRunner technology, Service Test lets users conduct functional and performance tests for services, including checking for standards compliance and interoperability testing. In addition, service emulation capabilities allow testers to get started early, before services are built.
Service Test Management is designed to help manage the process of testing new and modified services. Users can automatically import services from Mercury’s Systinet registry product to create test requirements and plans. The software also can generate test cases based on service changes made in the Systinet registry.
Services can be difficult to test because they do not have a GUI, says Avrami Tzur, vice president of SOA products at Mercury. In addition, all the possible interrelationships among services and the applications they support can make it difficult for IT staff to devise a thorough testing methodology. Testing complexity grows exponentially as the number of interrelated services and applications grows, Tzur says.
“Mercury Service Test deals with the technical aspects of how to test a service — the lack of a graphical user interface, the need to support multiple protocols, the need to look at what goes on underneath the surface,” Tzur says. “Mercury Service Test Management deals with the complexity of testing multiple small applications.”
On the governance front, Mercury is upgrading Systinet 2, which already includes a registry and repository, as well as policy management, contract management, and service publishing and discovery features. In the new version, Mercury added dashboards that display conditions such as service availability and services changes; RSS support for distributing alerts; and taxonomy management features for categorizing services based on business and technical requirements.
For production environments, Mercury is adding SOA management capabilities to its existing Business Availability Center family of products. Mercury integrated its application mapping software with its Systinet 2 registry product so companies can be alerted when new services are registered or an unregistered, rogue services is detected.
In addition, Web services monitoring tools provide real-time updates on the availability and performance of services, composite applications and related infrastructure and application components. When issues crop up, diagnostics tools are designed to provide early warning of a service or SOA-based application problem, identify what area of the business may be impacted, and fix the problem.
Having more tightly integrated tools across the services lifecycle — from development and testing to production — makes it easier for IT staff to spot potential vulnerabilities, says Christopher Lochhead, chief marketing officer at Mercury. For example, by linking the Systinet 2 registry product with Service Test products, a developer can see not only the technical attributes and policies associated with a service, but also how the service was tested during its development.
“What was it tested for? Do you need to go back and test it for the use you’re intending, or can you depend on the testing that was done because you’re using it in a similar way?” Lochhead says. “Those are important questions.”
For Ben Hastings, the new and revamped products are a welcome addition to Mercury’s portfolio. Hastings is senior technical lead for capacity and performance services at publishing company Elsevier in Dayton, Ohio.
Hastings’ team uses a number of Mercury products for testing IT assets, including QuickTest Professional and LoadRunner. While Mercury has added some SOA-focused features to its offerings over the last couple of years, it hasn’t been enough to keep up with Elsevier and its three-year SOA effort.
“From a load test perspective, we’ve had to creatively make use of LoadRunner. It had some functionality that allowed us to exercise the Web service layer directly, but there wasn’t anything that was specifically built for testing a Web service,” Hastings says. For functional testing of Web services, Elsevier had to bring in another vendor’s product, he says.
He’s looking forward to using the new tools to test elements of Elsevier’s SOA environment — where one application potentially hits 15 different services, making testing complicated.
“One Web service might have a dependency on Oracle and a content repository, another might have a dependency on a search engine and some metadata warehouse,” Hastings says. It’s helpful to isolate the client application from the technicalities of communicating with each of these systems, “but because you’re abstracting those layers from the client, it’s difficult to manage and have visibility all the way through to make sure everything is functioning the way it should.”
One new capability Hastings is particularly excited about in the Mercury products is the ability to automatically look at the requests that could potentially be made of a service and “easily parameterize those input values to come up with a good test that covers all the functionality we’re concerned with,” he says.
Mercury’s new and upgraded SOA products are available now. Meanwhile, HP is in the process of acquiring Mercury for $4.5 billion. The deal, announced in July, is expected to close by yearend.
