Jason English

Virtualization Track at Cloud Expo Any die-hard software geek tends to be fascinated with solving the biggest, most complex IT problems enterprises face. In terms of testers, this means moving away from manual testing and getting teams to "go agile" with early development testing, or looking "between the boxes" into validating complex middle-tier technologies. In today's enterprise, most of the business logic happens deeper within the applications where services communicate transactions through an ESB and other messaging and data layers, both within the company's IT environment and with third-party systems such as Cloud-and SaaS-based services. In these environments, concerns over manual testing can often get left behind as it is hard to validate a multi-tier SOA or BPMS-based app by testing at the user interface. Root causes of software issues are difficult to diag... (more)

An Introduction to SOA and Virtualization

I’ve been asked a number of times recently by industry peers and technology journalists about “virtualization” as it relates to SOA. Well, there are in fact at least 3 distinct ways that you can use virtualization concepts in SOA, so I think that it would be good for me to give you a definition of those three, and then in the next few days I will blog on each one of them independently. Rich Seeley recently interviewed me for a SearchWebServices.com article on the first and most often mentioned type of virtualization I’ll introduce -- which is hardware virt... (more)

Service-Oriented Virtualization - Can Virtual Environments Take Performance & Load Testing?

The iTKO SOA Testing, Validation & Virtualization Blog The practice and technology of Virtualization really has legs - it keeps moving forward, from hardware virtualization, virtual test beds, to virtual endpoints, to actually simulating the behavior of the software itself, which we're calling Service-Oriented Virtualization (or "SOV" if you need a TLA for it). Now we are seeing the Performance Lab getting into the action on this practice. For interconnected apps like SOA and serious enterprise integrations, the guys with the load testing firepower have tools like LoadRunner and ... (more)

The ESB - SOA Hullaballoo

Jason English's Blog With multiple ESB platforms, you are still providing a very good way to bring underlying business applications and transaction systems to bear with an integration and messaging framework, sometimes with business process management as well. Yes they are different systems, but they can be pulled together effectively as long as the validation is there, and as long as the multiple teams have a means to virtualize their dependencies and continue developing and testing new functionality. I had a talk with Rich Seeley from SearchSOA a couple weeks ago, and his artic... (more)

Will SOA Fold into Cloud Computing?

I'm on my way to STARwest in Disneyland, CA today, and since it's been a little while since my last software quality-focused conference, I'm particularly interested to see how these testing experts and vendors are addressing the needs of a more distributed computing environment. Our own expert Rajeev Gupta is coming in to present "Building the SOA Quality Center of Excellence". Joe McKendrick recently posted, CTO Predicts SOA Will Fade into SaaS.  He quoted Ron Huxter, CTO of the provincial government of Ontario, “Over the last ten years, we’ve got most of the common business pra... (more)