Parasoft SOA package addresses business process/system integration testing

Application Life Cycle specialist Parasoft moved recently to expand coverage of critical aspects of complex transactions extending – using the company’s terms -  “through web interfaces, backend services, ESBs, databases, and everything in between.” The result is a considerable update to Parasoft’s SOA Quality Solution line.

As BPM meets SOA, testing transactions only gets more complex. And test solutions are evolving to meet new requirements.

“As we see organizations implementing BPM or abstracted types of business process logic with calls to various distributed systems, we see people having a hard time piecing together end-to-end transactions or broader business process tests,” says Wayne Ariola, Parasoft VP of Strategy, Parasoft. When you are creating tests that will transit a slew of systems, your tests only get more complex, he indicated.

“The challenge is that it becomes very componentized as engines like BPEL can call multiple distributed services or applications in order to complete a transaction,” said Ariola.

Take for example a service-oriented component used for clearing stock purchases in a transaction system. Flowing through the transaction, in fact, are a series of services that hit a number of applications that do different things (price checks, account balance checks, and so on). “From a testing perspective, that could be a nightmare,” said Ariola.

Parasoft supports various ways of handling such issues, he said. Teams can continuously validate critical aspects of complex transactions throughout the transaction’s path. Moreover, the latest release has features specific to TIBCO, Progress Sonic, Oracle/BEA, IBM, Software AG webMethods, and other platforms.