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Test early. Test often. Like flossing, you know it's a good habit. But if you aren't conducting automated testing throughout development, you are exposing your company to a "root canal" problem - a software error that will be both costly and painful to fix.

Quality is the problem
Quality is a proven lever for increased business value in manufacturing, product design and customer service. Despite emerging standards, the software side of business has failed to realize quality. The overall failure rate of enterprise development has remained steady, with only 25 percent of implementation projects successfully meeting budget and timeline. Errors in deployed systems amount to US$5.9 billion in annual costs, according to industry estimates.

Companies try to leverage their existing systems alongside emerging technologies for a competitive edge. While J2EE standards and web services improve widespread connectivity among business systems, supporting an ever-growing set of integration points increases the complexity and risk of enterprise development.

If we need development quality, why hasn't automated testing become a standard?
When you do the math, you realize that it is simply infeasible to thoroughly test a system manually. Developers can unit test what they believe is a right outcome, but they are usually the least qualified to validate that the actual business requirements are met. QA teams can test for front-end bugs, but they have no visibility into the root cause of the errors they find. And no manual test can uncover the long-term effects of sustained or highly variable use on a system.

Many enterprises have invested huge sums into automated testing solutions. In practice, teams will admit that these solutions often end up as shelfware. This occurs for several reasons:

• Tight timelines cause QA processes to get left out of the requirement and design phases of development
• Developers are still expected to write code, and write test code at the same time
• The testing tools are too complex for business owners and QA teams to use and understand
• Testing reports failures, but doesn't uncover exactly where the error occurred
• High total cost of ownership (TCO) of per-user, per-component licensing, implementation and training costs limits the number of participants in the testing process
• Existing tools do not provide true automated test coverage of all the components of a complex J2EE environment

Simply mandating quality will not cut it in software development. Executives need to set realistic standards for quality improvement and get buy-in from the developers and analysts who must work with the testing solution. Quality should be top priority for every participant in the development process, not just developers.

Make everyone own quality with LISA
LISA, from iTKO, is the first and only comprehensive no-code automated testing solution built from the ground up for J2EE and web services development. LISA offers the tools quality demands, including regression, performance, load, soak, JDBC, server, middleware and unit testing (with JUnit/Ant support).

But the biggest advantage of LISA is that everyone can own quality. Non-technical users can finally participate in the testing process without having to write or understand code. Through an intuitive point-and-click UI, interactive test cases can be created, shared and modified by QA personnel and business managers on the fly, and run on an ad-hoc or scheduled basis. Test results are viewed as live performance graphs or archived to provide developers with the root cause of errors down to the most granular code level.

Quality is not a commodity you can buy. It's an experience that your entire team needs to live. LISA offers deep functionality, high performance and ease of use that you will not find at any price point in the market. But it is priced to allow your entire team to continually test at every phase of development, from requirements to design, development and deployment.

For more information, download a free evaluation copy of LISA 2.0, or sign up to preview the extended functionality of LISA 2.5 at www.itko.com.

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