SOA Industry Leaders Bridge the Gaps between Development, QA and Operations to Improve the Quality of System Components and End-to-End Transactions

MONROVIA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Parasoft Corporation and AmberPoint today announced closed-loop integration between their industry-leading SOA quality and runtime governance solutions. Their joint solution brings significant benefits to organizations by automating test suite generation, improving the accuracy of quality processes, raising team collaboration and reducing resolution times for complex and evolving Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) systems.

"Because SOA implementations involve increasingly distributed and complex systems, it becomes more challenging to create the sophisticated testing scenarios required for quality assurance across the service lifecycle," said Jason Bloomberg, Managing Partner, ZapThink. "These challenges threaten to extend testing lifecycles and reduce agility, but more importantly, they jeopardize system security and reliability. The integration between AmberPoint and Parasoft addresses these issues, giving organizations an automated way to generate realistic, true-to-production scenarios for exercising their services."

Bridging the Gap between Development, QA and Operations

One of the greatest challenges of SOA quality is how to validate realistic transactions involving distributed services that may not be available for testing. Consider the example of a services-based account provisioning system that’s losing orders. To solve this problem, the development team has to test the fixed application in a safe sandbox that replicates the transaction flows of the production environment—or risk breaking the system upon redeploying the application.

The integrated Parasoft-AmberPoint solution helps teams overcome this challenge by automatically emulating—or virtualizing—services based on real-world historical data collected from the runtime environment. With this baseline established, teams can exercise distributed services in context—without impacting partners’ normal business transactions.

• Bases tests on running reality, not just synthetic messages

• Comprehensive runtime data on individual services as well as end-to-end transactions

• Detects the impact of errant changes before they affect production environments

• Significantly reduces manual steps by automating baseline collection and test suite generation

• Enables organizations to censor sensitive production data to comply with Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA and other industry regulations

Customer Benefits:

• Improves the accuracy of quality processes

• Improves team collaboration

• Reduces the testing lifecycle and resolution times

• Facilitates reliable, compliant SOA applications

“Our closed-loop integration with AmberPoint is a big step forward,” said Wayne Ariola, Vice President of Business Development at Parasoft. “Bringing real-world historical data into the quality realm enables the development and QA not only makes testing more realistic, thereby improving the reliability of the applications, it also significantly shortens the testing lifecycle.”

About AmberPoint

AmberPoint is the runtime SOA governance of choice for commercial organizations, federal agencies and software vendors alike. Utilizing a policy-based approach to manage the health and well-being of SOA applications, AmberPoint's industry-leading software brings real-time visibility and control to services and applications at each stage of the SOA lifecycle. For more information, contact AmberPoint at 510.663.6300 or info@amberpoint.com, or visit www.amberpoint.com for a complimentary developer's edition of AmberPoint software.

About Parasoft

"Challenges are emerging in testing service-oriented architecture (SOA) systems. Current testing is not sufficient to deal with the new requirements arising from several SOA features such as composition, loose coupling, and code without a graphical user interface. The most critical architecture information of an SOA solution is actually how services are composed and interact with each other. This paper proposes a gray-box testing approach, that is, an approach that involves having access to internal workings, data structures, and algorithms when designing the test cases but tests at the user level as a black box, that is, by applying inputs and observing outputs. This approach leverages business processes and the underlying SOA layered architecture to better test SOA solutions. A commonly used language to model business processes is BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), which is the focus of the approach described in this paper. Among the layered artifacts, the business process view represents the global behavior of the SOA system and thus is a good candidate as supplemental architectural information to the functional requirement or specification in test-case design and generation. This approach has three key enablers: test-path exploration, trace analysis, and regression test selection. BPELTester is an innovative tool that implements this method. It has been piloted in several projects and the initial pilot results are presented in this paper."

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - September 8, 2008) - SOASTA, the leading provider of cloud-based testing solutions, today announced the successful close of $6.4 million in Series B funding. New investor, Formative Ventures, a leading early-stage venture capital firm focused on next-generation emerging technologies, led the round with continuing participation from previous investors including Canaan Partners and The Entrepreneurs' Fund. The new funding will be used to support product enhancements, marketing, and business development efforts to address the growing demand for SOASTA's web testing solution for Cloud Computing environments.

SOASTA also announced that Clint Chao, co-founder and general partner at Formative Ventures, has been elected to the company's board, joining Canaan Partners and The Entrepreneurs' Fund.

"We're always on the lookout for promising companies that provide a critical missing link that can serve as a catalyst for market growth," said Clint Chao, general partner, Formative Ventures. "In SOASTA, we found a fast growing company that helps enterprises more readily and comfortably move their data onto cloud networks. SOASTA's 'reliability-as-a-service' solution enables companies to easily test the performance and scale of their platform, whether they're hosted behind a firewall, or out on one of the cloud networks, and that should further accelerate cloud market adoption."

Silicon Valley-based SOASTA launched in early 2008 with a new way of testing today's web applications and services. The company has amassed an impressive and growing list of customers, and was named a "Cool Vendor" by Gartner Group in its 2008 "Cool Vendors in Application Development (AD)."

"Progressive investors like Formative and Canaan who appreciate the new frontier of cloud computing will help SOASTA increase its market reach and penetration," said Tom Lounibos, CEO, SOASTA. "This round of financing will enable us to aggressively invest in our product and go-to-market strategies and plans, and is a testimony to the confidence our investors have in our company and market opportunity."

About SOASTA

SOASTA, Inc. (pronounced sō'-sta), is the leading provider of cloud-based testing solutions. SOASTA's mission is to ensure that today's web applications and services perform in a high quality, scalable, and predictable manner. The company's product, SOASTA CloudTest™, is available as an on demand service in the cloud or as an appliance (virtual and hardware), and enables developers to test and monitor their web applications and services at an affordable price. SOASTA CloudTest supports Load, Performance, Functional, and web UI/Ajax testing. SOASTA is privately held and headquartered in Mountain View, California.

For more information about SOASTA, please visit www.soasta.com.

BOSTON, September 4 /PRNewswire/ --

- Latest release enables QA and Development Teams to quickly measure the quality of their WSDLs through an automated scoring system

Crosscheck Networks, Inc., the market-leading provider of SOA Testing Tools, today announced immediate availability of SOAPSonar(TM) v.4.0. This release incorporates modules that enable QA and Development teams to quickly test the quality of their enterprise WSDLs based on an easy to understand scoring system. The scoring system provides the teams a valuable feedback loop to improve the quality of their WSDLs thus increasing interoperability, security and integrity of services.

"This release addresses one of the major pain points that SOA users face that is how to test for quality of WSDLs," said Mamoon Yunus, Chief Technology Officer at Forum Systems and advisor to Crosscheck Networks. "The latest SOAPSonar release offers unique capabilities that provide strong validation features that helps strengthen the quality of enterprise services."

The following features in SOAPSonar v4.0 enable testers to easily validate ever increasing sophisticated SOA web services deployments:

    
    -- WS-Policy Consumption and Policy Generation
    -- WSDL Scoring
    -- Custom XSD Schema Support
    -- Schematron Validation
    -- SmartCard Certificates
    -- Asynchronous Performance Testing
    -- Performance Testing Error Rates Statistics Optimization techniques to
       parse jumbo WSDLs and Schemas

Based on patent-pending XSD-mutation technology, SOAPSonar (TM) delivers on the four pillars of SOA Web services testing: functional regression, performance testing, security assessment and compliance validation. These four pillars ensure robust, scalable reliable and secure web services are deployed within an enterprise.

Pricing and Availability

SOAPSonar v4.0 is immediately available to all Crosscheck Networks customers running version 3.5 or later. For new customers, SOAPSonar pricing varies by model and starts at US$799 annual subscription per instance.

About Crosscheck Networks

Crosscheck Network's mission is to provide products for testing, diagnosing and controlling enterprise Web Services. Crosscheck Networks' products provide QA professionals, security personnel, and compliance officers with necessary information about the functional completeness, scalability, security and interoperability compliance of their Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Through SOAPSonar(TM) -- industry leading comprehensive SOA testing product -- IT professionals make more informed decisions that enable their companies to stay within corporate quality and regulatory boundaries. The SOA diagnostics architecture is the first in the industry to encompass security, compliance, performance and functional regression under a unified architectural framework. The architecture enables the product to be deployed from the core to the perimeter of an enterprise.

Visit Crosscheck Networks at http://www.crosschecknet.com/.

Web site: http://www.crosschecknet.com