iTKO, Inc. announces the integration of its LISA Enterprise SOA Testing Framework software with the Mercury Test Director test management software tool.

LISA already supported easy test case attachment as simple XML files within Test Director (now known as HP Quality Center) and other test management and development process solutions, from issue and bug tracking tools, to source code (SCM) and requirements management (RM) software. Now iTKO LISA tests are executable within the workflow of Test Director, and they report back results to maintain the context and status of the testing process.

“We noticed that a lot of customers are seeking a way to automate the test creation and staging process against many heterogeneous SOA technologies, while retaining their current test management practices in tools such as Test Director,” said iTKO founder and Chief Architect John Michelsen. “So we want to make it as easy as possible for them to dovetail SOA, ESB and Java test automation into their test management applications of choice, which accelerates their return on investment in LISA.”

The solution has already been implemented and proven within customer engagements, but now it is available out-of-the-box for all LISA customers who wish to extend Test Director. By enabling the execution of tests and reporting test results back within the same workflow, LISA gives developers and QA managers a much more robust way to analyze test results at runtime, without the need for extensive integration and cleansing of test data on the part of the customer.

"Maintaining quality as an organization moves to a SOA adds additional challenges to the exiting quality management environment," said Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst at SOA analyst firm ZapThink. "By integrating iTKO LISA with HP Quality Center, QA personnel can leverage their existing skills and processes while adding the additional tasks that SOA quality requires in an efficient, low-risk manner."

“By wrapping LISA tests within the Test Director process, we can provide a low-impact way to quickly start finding the root cause of bugs and requirements misunderstandings within today’s complex SOA applications,” said Michelsen. “Previously we saw a lot of customers losing track of test automation, because they were manually running test executions in different software packages, and reporting the results back into their test management systems as Word or Excel spreadsheets.”

The integration streamlines both test design and execution processes that were often manually accomplished by testers. By simply loading a LISA test case into Test Director, users get real-time execution of LISA tests, with full capture of the test results and LISA callbacks returning from any system under test. The integration also enhances regression/build testing and scheduled testing capabilities from within the same test repository, as Test Director can now launch LISA tests as if it were a command line order and import the results of the tests.

The functionality is available to current and future LISA customers under maintenance with iTKO, using Test Director (or HP Quality Center) versions 8.0 or later. For more information, visit www.itko.com.