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Category: Continuous Testing

Continuous testing is the process of executing automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline to obtain immediate feedback on the business risks associated with a software release candidate.

  • Testing: Your Secret Weapon for DevOps Success

    Testing: Your Secret Weapon for DevOps Success

    I spend virtually all day, every day, speaking with IT leaders who recognize that their bottom line ultimately rests on their ability to accelerate the delivery of innovative software. That’s why they’ve invested so much in digital transformation initiatives—including hiring the best and brightest developers, scaling Agile, driving DevOps adoption, automating the continuous delivery pipeline, and all the other components involved in moving from ideation to delivery as rapidly as possible.

    In most cases, this investment has exposed opportunities to optimize culture, process, and tooling—but not yet delivered the level of acceleration and flexibility that IT leaders expect. I’m frequently asked: “Now what? I think we’re ‘doing’ DevOps. But what else is needed to deliver on faster innovation?”

    Something as unsexy as “transform testing” is not what people expect to hear. As someone who’s been in the software testing industry since 2003, I know that software testing is typically seen as a necessary evil, not a strategic advantage. However, I’ve also witnessed how it can be a secret weapon for surging ahead of the competition.  

    The dirty little secret in the IT industry is that despite all the advancements in software development, software testing remains dominated by yesterday’s application lifecycle management (ALM) tools and manual testing—and they simply don’t meet the needs of today’s accelerated development processes. Transforming testing for the modern era represents a tremendous opportunity. It’s a low-hanging fruit that can help you increase acceleration, reduce risk and cut costs.

    Boost Acceleration

    Agile and DevOps initiatives aim to accelerate the process of delivering working software to the end user. However, even organizations that have adopted Agile and DevOps report dismal test automation rates: less than 20 percent for end-to-end testing. This means that after the rest of your software delivery pipeline is automated and optimized, an outdated testing process eventually emerges as the bottleneck. By transforming testing, you can increase your throughput significantly. I’ve witnessed many companies increase time to market by 55 percent by modernizing their testing process.

    Reduce Risk

    Now that software is the primary interface to the business, a software failure is a business failure. Yet, with today’s compressed and continuous delivery cycles, it’s simply impossible to test everything before every release—even if testing is automated. By aligning testing with your top business risks, you can automatically assess the overall impact to the core user experience and instantly determine if the release candidate has an acceptable level of business risk. This is critical for stopping high-risk software from impacting your prospects, customers, and partners.

    Companies still relying on traditional quality processes and platforms are usually covering only about 10 percent of their top business risks with their current test suite. A goal of 80 percent is typically achievable with about three months of effort.

    Cut Testing Costs

    There are hard costs associated with trying to retrofit outdated testing processes and tools into modern delivery processes. Many organizations try to bridge the testing gap by throwing an abundance of manual testers at the problem, typically through a global system integrator. By the most recent estimates, this approach consumes approximately 35 percent of an average IT budget—a total of $30+ billion per year, globally.

    A way to help testers achieve high test automation rates allows you to reallocate a large portion of that testing spend toward creative tasks which advance competitive differentiation. Many enterprises that transitioned manual testers into “scriptless” (non-technical) test automation have slashed testing costs—and eliminated one of the most significant constraints to achieving faster time to market.

    Get the Analysts’ Perspective

    Analysts at Forrester (e.g., Diego Lo Giudice) and Gartner (e.g., Joachim Herschmann and Thomas Murphy) have spent years advocating that transforming testing is a business imperative. If you’d like to get their perspective, I encourage you to review some of their latest research:

     

    About the Author / Sandeep Johri

    Sandeep Johri, CEO of Tricentis, has more than 25 years of experience as a technology executive and serial entrepreneur—including roles at Hewlett-Packard, Appcelerator, Oblix (acquired by Oracle), Blue Lane Technologies (acquired by VMware), and numerous other startups in Silicon Valley and India. Johri earned an MBA from Stanford University, a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from Wayne State University, Detroit, and a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Pune University, India. Connect with him on Twitter.

  • Rainforest QA Launches Crowdsourced Exploratory Testing to Expand Test Coverage and Surface Issues Faster than Traditional Methods

    SAN FRANCISCO — March 9, 2017 —  Rainforest QA, creators of the world’s only AI-powered crowdtesting platform for agile and continuous integration software teams, today announced that Rainforest QA Exploratory is available to all customers. The new product leverages Rainforest’s unique crowdsourcing model to employ an elite, vetted tester army of thousands to perform exploratory tests in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of competitors.

    Bug discovery and building test coverage are two of the most time-consuming activities for QA teams. Typically, teams must devise and write tests ahead of time and continuously update them as software changes. While many teams frequently perform exploratory testing to surface undiscovered issues in their software, the undertaking is a manual and time intensive one that often takes away from development time and other QA activities.

    With Rainforest Exploratory’s unique crowdsourcing approach, companies can instead leverage a global team of testers to execute their exploratory testing. This elite group not only explores an application to identify new issues, but also creates tests to subsequently catch those newly-found issues in future test runs. Customers can expect results in as little as 48 hours, and results include documentation of issues found, video recordings of the test execution, and scripted Rainforest regression tests for easy replication.

    “Continuous deployment puts immense pressure on development teams; the demand oftentimes means businesses are shipping software with bugs, which can adversely impact their brands, customer loyalty and revenue,” said Fred Stevens-Smith, CEO of Rainforest QA. “Teams just don’t have the time or resources to perform continuous testing on their own, let alone scan for ‘unknown unknowns’ by regularly performing exploratory testing. With our crowdsourcing approach, we help protect a company’s product experience with a trained tester army that pulls double-duty: providing teams with a fast, resource-efficient way to scour their application for undiscovered issues and ensure that those newly found issues are tracked going forward.”

    Poll Everywhere, the online polling app, turned to Rainforest QA Exploratory to identify bugs without taking team members away from other projects. While Poll Everywhere is the leading audience polling platform, working with over 100,000 educators and 40% of Fortune 1000 companies worldwide, it runs a lean development team, comprised of one full time QA engineer and 17 developers. Iterating and deploying frequently through continuous integration, it’s imperative that testing is run as close to real-time as possible to enable the software to ship faster with less risk. After implementing the beta version of Exploratory, Poll Everywhere was able to increase its regression testing coverage by 104 percent and identify 75 new bugs, allowing the company to address significantly more issues before deployment.

    “Rainforest Exploratory allows us to find bugs quickly, deploy faster and ship code with more confidence,” said Brian Goodman, product manager at Poll Everywhere. “We use Exploratory to keep our development team focused on building new features, without sacrificing quality or test coverage.”

    For the full Poll Everywhere case study, visit https://www.rainforestqa.com/customers/poll-everywhere/.

    Exploratory by Rainforest QA is now available to all customers, following a beta test period last year. To get started with Rainforest Exploratory or add it to your existing Rainforest QA strategy, visit: https://www.rainforestqa.com/product/exploratory-testing/

    — Jules Louis

  • Ubertesters Platform Integrates into HPE Mobile Center to Streamline and Strengthen Mobile Testing for Developers

    Ramsey, N.J. —February 20, 2017 – Ubertesters, a world leading provider of QA testing solutions, today announced that the Ubertesters platform is now integrated into HPE Mobile Center. The integration provides Hewlett Packard Enterprise customers with a capability rich, well-integrated experience of crowd testing and mobile beta testing management for real devices providing support for the testing process across the mobile testing cycle – from the distribution of the build to the end-user – to ensure high-quality application delivery.

    The increased global focus on mobile app development, and the changing needs of mobile development enterprises created a need to improve the QA beta management process to fit the enterprise world. HPE Mobile Center users can now enjoy the benefits of the Ubertesters platform to better manage the different remote testing teams and ‘in-the-wild’ crowd testers.
    Starting with Mobile Center 2.01 release, users will have an easy and seamless experience trying out complimentary crowd testing services, direct from the management console.

    “Building high-quality mobile applications can be a difficult, time consuming and expensive process,” said Raffi Margaliot (@raffima), Senior Vice President and General Manager, Application Delivery Management, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “As a result of HPE Mobile Center integrating Ubertesters platform – and leveraging HPE’s strength in analytics and security – developers have access to a robust tool set to efficiently build and test applications with the speed, quality and scale needed to deliver high-quality mobile and web application experiences.”

    “We are honored that HPE, a global leader in QA software testing solutions, has integrated Ubertesters robust and comprehensive platform to enhance their application lifecycle management (ALM) software suite,” said Ran Rachlin, Ubertesters co-founder and CEO. “In today’s development environment of agile, DevOps, Continuous Deployment and more, release cycles are getting shorter and testing is done with many remote testers and beta testers. The Ubertesters platform is essential to better manage the crowd and mobile QA manual testing process on your way to launch a better rated app with better user experience.”

    — Jules Louis

  • Dispelling the Myths Around Continuous Testing

    Dispelling the Myths Around Continuous Testing

    You may have seen the term “continuous testing” and thought it was just the DevOps flavor of the month. Some might even think it isn’t part of DevOps or isn’t for cloud or hybrid cloud applications. Well, think again.

    As it turns out, there are a few more fallacies around the idea of continuous testing floating around the application development community. Ready to find out?

    Chapter five in the new, free eBook “Continuous Testing for Dummies, IBM Limited Edition,” lists 10 myths. Here are a few to ponder:

    Continuous testing is only about executing test scripts

    Limiting the term “testing” to only the execution of test scripts is a misnomer. As my co-author, @Al_Wagner and I point out, testing and checking application functionality are not equal. There’s a long list of testing items to check off one’s list, the least of which is collaborating.

    Continuous testing is merely a buzzword

    Guess what? It’s a core part of that essential DevOps practice, continuous delivery. And, with customers demanding higher quality software faster, it isn’t going anywhere soon. In short, invest in continuous testing.

    Only agile teams do continuous testing

    False! Some or all parts of continuous testing are critical for any type of team as well as all players. This includes test automation, production-like test environments and realistic test data. A related myth—only testers contribute to testing—is also not true at all. The idea of continuous testing includes all team members. The book describes the roles everybody has to play. For example, did you know that designers can improve testing? They can work with testers to help them understand where the fragile parts of the application are.

    Automating tests means we need fewer tests

    No, the machines are not taking over. Automating tests does not mean cutting back on testing jobs. To the contrary, automation is reducing testers’ needs to act like cyborgs and spend more time doing what they do best: learn and experiment.

    Continuous testing isn’t for large, complex systems

    Au contraire! The best thing you can do for large or complex systems is leverage continuous testing practices and tools such as service virtualization to conduct end-to-end testing earlier and more frequently, rather than having each subsystem do all its own testing in isolation until just before deployment to production.

    To read more myths about continuous testing, check out “Continuous Testing for Dummies, IBM Limited Edition,” here.

    About the Author / Marianne Hollier

    MarianneMarianne Hollier is an IBM and Open Group Master Certified IT Specialist in application development. She has strong, practical expertise in measurably improving the software development life cycle and driving the necessary cultural changes to make it work. She is instrumental in architecting, tailoring and deploying the IBM DevOps best practices as well as appropriate software development tools on many types of projects, from large to small, long to fast-track, agile to traditional. Marianne is especially passionate about all things testing—process, tools, culture and automation. Her experience is broad-based, spanning both custom projects as well as standard software packages that apply to many industries, including refining, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, health care, financial, automotive, government and retail. Connect with Marianne on LinkedIn or Twitter.

  • QASymphony Launches qTest Pulse, a Continuous Testing Solution Focused on DevOps

    QASymphony Launches qTest Pulse, a Continuous Testing Solution Focused on DevOps

    ATLANTA, GA (February 14, 2017) QASymphony, a leader in test management solutions for the enterprise, today announced the general market availability of qTest Pulse, a new testing application designed specifically for development teams practicing continuous testing within their DevOps pipeline. qTest Pulse integrates with the most popular DevOps tools on the market including GitHub, JIRA, and Jenkins, enabling development teams to deliver high quality software with every release.

    QASymphony is hosting a webinar on March 1st at 2pm ET to demo qTest Pulse. More details here.

    Global enterprises are under increasing pressure to release software at a rapid pace.  As a result, companies are starting to adopt DevOps practices within pockets of their IT organization.  While DevOps adoption is significant, it is generally taking place at the project or team level, with full company-wide adoption of DevOps at only 20%.  The vast majority of enterprises continue to practice a mix of Waterfall and Agile development.  QASymphony’s qTest is the only platform that can support this diversity of development methodologies with solutions that cover BDD/TDD, Exploratory, Agile/Waterfall, and now DevOps testing.  And with qTest Insights organizations can consolidate manual and automated testing analytics into one complete view for the customer. This ensures a high level of quality across all the different teams in an organization.

    With qTest Pulse, DevOps teams are able to:

    • Integrate continuous testing activities directly with Agile ALM systems like JIRA and version control tools like Git for full-circle traceability of test results back to individual tickets and even source code check-ins.
    • Streamline the DevOps pipeline by directly connecting all testing activity, both manual and automated, into the CI Build process run by tools such as Jenkins or CircleCI.
    • Store manual test cases in GitHub alongside code with push-button conversion to Selenium or other automated test frameworks to accelerate the automation process.
    • Facilitate better and faster communication between developers and testers via event-driven notifications and integrations across ALM, version control and CI systems.

    “Our customers have told us that are evolving the way they develop software,” said Dave Keil, CEO of QASymphony.  “Rather than having one single development methodology, they often have several different teams developing software in different ways.  With the launch of qTest Pulse, we now provide a comprehensive platform that can support all of the different teams within an enterprise, whether they are releasing software once a day, once a month or once a year. Additionally, our robust business intelligence and reporting capability brings together all of the testing-related analytics, providing executives with a complete view into software quality across the enterprise.”

    Test Pulse is available in cloud or on-premise versions. Visit QASymphony.com to sign up for a full demo.

    — Jules Louis

  • Relevant Continuous Testing: The Primary Key to DevOps

    Relevant Continuous Testing: The Primary Key to DevOps

    My recent blog, “7 Pillars of DevOps,” identified seven essential best practices areas that make up successful DevOps and explained that the pillars are not silos, but rather foundations that need to be kept in balance. One of the pillars is continuous testing (CT).

    For well-balanced DevOps, CT performs tests that are fast enough to just fit within the time budget, yet thorough enough to cover the quality needed for deployment to production. Despite the need for balance, CT can be considered the true backbone of DevOps because testing is the one pillar that proves the validity of changes needed to operate and validate the correct operation of the other pillars from end to end across the pipeline.

    Compared to older testing strategies in which large software changes were tested as a complete product after “release to QA,” DevOps CT strategically tests changes incrementally over a series of DevOps stages. CT begins the moment a change is made in development and continues through all DevOps pipeline stages. Release readiness is judged on analysis of test results accumulated prior to deployment. With Blue-Green, A/B and Canary test strategies, some tests may continue into the live environment after deployment, and the results may influence future CT activities.

    Like continuous integration (CI), frequent, small, incremental testing has many merits. Quick feedback on problems enables a release consisting of many individual changes to be tested incrementally with confidence. The root cause of problems can be isolated much faster when the changes are tested incrementally. The problem is determining which tests are most relevant to run at each stage of a DevOps pipeline with content, with the risk of changes varying widely from one change to the next.

    Given that testing is a stochastic sampling process, there is no such thing as 100 percent testing in any absolute sense. Left unchecked, the content of tests will grow exponentially beyond the content of the product that is being tested. No number of test resources, even if elastic on-demand cloud infrastructures are used, will keep up with the growing demands to satisfy test requirements. The key is to create and choose tests that are most relevant to the changes that are being processed in the pipeline rather than attempting to run all tests with no regard to actual matter what the changes you wish to inspect. A strategy that chooses the most relevant tests at each stage in the pipeline is optimal.

    Several strategies for creating and selecting relevant tests are described below. These relevant test strategies may be used standalone for specific DevOps stages or a plurality of these relevant test strategies may be used end to end across the pipeline.

    1. Choose tests that focus on source code deficiencies. Metrics based on static analysis scans can determine which areas of source code have the highest number of defects. Test creation and selection algorithms can provide higher weight to tests written for those areas. This seems like a good idea; however, there are several limitations. Scan tools are limited to specific languages, may miss critical defects and do not have intelligence regarding the systemwide relevance of a specific defect.
    2. Create and choose tests for areas of the code with low test coverage. This also sounds like a good idea, but it is not. The most obvious reason is that tests probably are not available to select or the coverage would have been higher in the first place. Also, code coverage algorithms, especially at the system level, are limited to simple metrics such statement coverage, which is not a good indicator of system-level performance.
    3. Create and choose tests that match the artifacts of build changes including build dependencies. In this approach, tests are mapped to build changes and tests are selected that match the changes. This sounds logical, but unfortunately, a static mapping between test and build artifacts may not reflect system impacts of changes, as critical failures may occur due to interactions with modules outside the build dependency chain.
    4. Create and choose tests per risk analysis. This approach keeps a running record of code changes correlated to test results. Tests that tend to fail the most when a code module is changed are selected. This approach has several advantages over the other approaches. Test selection is not limited to implementation language or build dependency maps. Empirical experience correlates to risk better than code structures in the stochastic context of testing. The same algorithms can be applied to every stage in the pipeline. And the pipeline metrics can be adjusted dynamically for each pipeline stage run.

    The above CT practices indicate that relevant testing strategies reduces the time for CT execution and reduces the infrastructure cost for CT, without sacrificing quality delivered to production.

    Summary

    What do you think? Do you agree with the above relevant continuous testing practices? Are there others you recommend?

    While DevOps implemented with all seven pillars provides a strong foundation for long-term enterprise business improvements, it is important to understand DevOps is not an island. Enterprises implementing DevOps should be aware that DevOps interoperates with other IT systems and practices. Enterprises are well-advised to put in place governance policies that encourage the selection of tool-agnostic IT partners with solutions that best suit the needs of each unique enterprise and can integrate and evolve DevOps together with all their IT systems.

    — Marc Hornbeek

  • Sauce Labs Acquires TestObject to Expand Real Device Mobile App Testing Platform

    Acquisition Strengthens Sauce Labs’ Position as the Only Automated Testing Solution for Web and Mobile Applications that Spans Desktop, Emulators, Simulators and Real Devices

    SAN FRANCISCO – Dec. 8, 2016 – Sauce Labs, Inc., provider of the world’s largest cloud-based platform for automated testing of web and mobile applications, today announced its acquisition of TestObject, a real device mobile app testing platform. The combined solution positions Sauce Labs as the only vendor providing automated testing coverage across desktops, emulators, simulators, and real devices for web applications and mobile, web, hybrid and native apps.

    “We were attracted to TestObject for its high speed and reliable real device testing for mobile applications, as well as the amazing engineering team behind it,” said Charles Ramsey, CEO of Sauce Labs. “This strategic acquisition accelerates our ability to provide the most comprehensive web and mobile testing solution in the market today. Our customers will benefit from a single platform for all their web and mobile automated testing needs.”

    According to Gartner, “a recommended approach to testing mobile apps is to find a healthy mix of emulators, simulators and real devices to get the best out of your test automation.” Sauce Labs says the combination of its technology and TestObject fulfills this criteria. Sauce Labs already offers the largest, cloud based automated testing platform on the market, running more than one million tests per day and more than 800 million tests run to date across desktop, emulators, simulators, and real devices. The TestObject acquisition brings additional real device coverage (200+ device types), a private cloud solution for enterprises that require the highest level of security, and high-speed manual testing on real devices. Combine that with Sauce Lab’s existing Real Device Cloud for automated mobile app testing in high concurrency, and Sauce Labs cements its position as the most comprehensive web and mobile testing platform.

    “We’re tremendously excited to join Sauce Labs during this transformational time in the software development industry,” said Hannes Lenke, CEO of TestObject. “Sauce Labs is the industry leader in the automated testing market with great brand awareness, thought leadership, and a global customer base. Our customers will not only benefit from our newly combined offering, but also our ability to innovate faster with additional resources and expertise. We are most pleased with the people of Sauce Labs and the great cultural match between our teams, and we are excited to help the company grow their market share in Europe.”

    TestObject is headquartered in Berlin, Germany and will provide a new European headquarters for Sauce Labs with Hannes Lenke serving as the General Manager for EMEA operations.

    Sauce Labs provides a high-performance, cloud-based automated testing platform that is optimized for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) workflows. When tests are automated and run in parallel on virtual machines and/or real devices, testing time is significantly reduced and IT teams no longer need to devote time to managing testing infrastructure. Sauce currently supports more than 800 browser, operating system and device platform combinations, including mobile emulators, simulators and real devices.

    Helpful Links

    About Sauce Labs
    Sauce Labs provides the world’s largest cloud-based platform for the automated testing of web and mobile applications. Its award-winning service eliminates the time and expense of maintaining an in-house testing infrastructure, freeing development teams of any size to innovate and release better software, faster.

    Sauce Labs is a privately held company funded by Toba Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Centerview Capital Technology, IVP and Adams Street Partners. For more information, please visit https://saucelabs.com.

    Gartner, “Market Guide for Mobile App Test Automation Tools” by Maritess Sobejana, and Adrian Leow.  April 25, 2016

    — Jules Louis

  • Keep Applications Running by Testing Early, Continuously

    Keep Applications Running by Testing Early, Continuously

    Almost every product we buy or use today goes through some form of extensive testing before it’s released on the market; typically, these tests are designed to replicate the worst-case scenarios that a product may encounter under real-world conditions.

    Automobiles, for example, go through extensive hot and cold weather testing in remote locations, and are driven over obstacle-laden tracks designed to push the limits of their durability. Even seemingly mundane objects such as children’s toys are exposed to abusive simulations to ensure that they don’t harbor any potentially hidden and harmful effects.

    On the current landscape, applications are the face of your business, often serving as the battleground where consumer loyalty is won or lost. Given this reality, it seems crazy to think that any applications are released having only been exposed to a minimum of tests. Yet, in the name of getting to market quickly, that’s far too often the case.

    As disciplines including agile and continuous delivery continue to increase the speed at which development teams can release software, it’s easy to put the crunch on testing in the rush to get an update released. But that’s a costly mistake in the long run, as research has shown that it is 50 percent less expensive to find an error in testing than to address the same error once it has reached production, and more than 90 percent cheaper  when addressed in the development/coding phase.

    Given the dramatic cost savings of addressing errors in development, clearly the goal of any organization focused on continuous delivery should be to shift testing left so a greater number of defects are found early in the development process. This is what we refer to as continuous testing, and it’s a huge part of the reason why I am so excited about CA’s acquisition of BlazeMeter.

    Performance load testing should be a core element of any continuous testing strategy because it is a critical factor in determining system reliability. Similar to the worst-case scenario testing that consumer products undergo, performance testing can quickly uncover applications defects that might otherwise go unnoticed. After all, the manner in which a system operates with a few hundred concurrent users may be very different than how it runs with thousands of users.

    BlazeMeter enables today’s development, operations and DevOps teams to conduct this critical performance testing earlier in the development process, saving countless hours and resources. The company is also competing—and winning—in a highly competitive marketplace where it has been pitted against much larger, more entrenched competitors.

    Part of the reason BlazeMeter is winning is its focus on offering a SaaS-based solution that is highly cost-effective and easy to engage. Using this model, customers can try  out the testing software with a few clicks, and then quickly move forward to broadly adopt the system. Another catalyst to its success: BlazeMeter was built using open source tools, such as Apache JMeter, used widely in the development community for performance and load testing. As a result, BlazeMeter can easily run and analyze JMeter and other open source-based load tests—such as Selenium, Gatling and Locust—within a commercial-grade performance testing system.

    This combination of a SaaS delivery model and incorporation of open-source tools, augmenting strong performance testing functionality, make BlazeMeter very complementary to CA’s existing continuous delivery solutions, including its CA Service Virtualization, CA Test Data Manager, CA Agile Requirements Designer and CA Release Automation products.

    At CA, we’re committed to providing the most comprehensive, integrated and open continuous delivery ecosystem, allowing our customers to release swiftly, test agilely and constantly increase reliably. The addition of BlazeMeter will further enable customers test continuously, thereby increasing agility and the overall quality of their software, to ensure that applications don’t break down on the side of the virtual road.

    — Aruna Ravichandran

  • CA Technologies to Acquire BlazeMeter to Drive Speed and Quality of Application Testing Practices

    NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire BlazeMeter, a leader in open source-based continuous application performance testing. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to close by year end.

    The acquisition of privately-held BlazeMeter will enable CA Technologies to extend its DevOps portfolio. BlazeMeter will seamlessly integrate with CA’s continuous delivery solutions to further improve testing efficiency and accelerate the deployment of applications.

    “BlazeMeter has redefined performance testing with its simplicity, fast-deployment SaaS model, and rapid time-to-value,” said Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer, CA Technologies. “The acquisition will reinforce our leadership position in continuous testing, and our efforts to democratize performance testing as organizations accelerate their DevOps journey to drive speed and quality in the delivery of new software updates and innovations.”

    As development teams move to Agile and continuous delivery practices to improve time-to-market of applications, enterprises are struggling to keep up. Testing speed is the major bottleneck in getting applications released faster. With BlazeMeter’s solution, developers and performance engineers can test earlier and often in the application lifecycle to improve their test coverage and avoid encountering performance problems too close to production.

    “Developers and performance engineers want to achieve superior test coverage by using open source tools and tools that can integrate well into the developer ecosystem,” said Alon Girmonsky, founder and CEO, BlazeMeter. “Joining forces with CA Technologies will enable BlazeMeter to continue developing our technology while enjoying the vast resources of CA Technologies to better serve our customers.”

    BlazeMeter’s commercial, self-service continuous application performance testing solution is fully compatible with Apache JMeter™ as well as other open source software tools like Selenium, Gatling and Locust.

    Founded in 2011, BlazeMeter has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel and Palo Alto, Calif.

    About CA Technologies

    CA Technologies (NASDAQ:CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business in every industry. From planning, to development, to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact, and communicate – across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at www.ca.com.

    — Jules Louis

  • It’s All About the Tools: Lifecycle Security and Testing

    It’s All About the Tools: Lifecycle Security and Testing

    In the past, whenever a new application or a new version of an application was bought to market, users often were abused as beta testers for security and usability. This was largely because of a lack of opportunity to test a large codebase effectively and efficiently.

    Similarly, the subsequent patches and new applications versions were rolled out with minimal testing, often fixing the existing bugs but introducing just as many new ones. Because users didn’t know there was an alternative, they accepted this situation grudgingly, and the consensus formed that there was no such thing as bug-free software.

    Today’s users are much less tolerant of bugs, particularly when those bugs are security vulnerabilities in hosted applications. Nowadays, anyone offering an application online rarely has to wait long for hackers to examine the weaknesses, which, for suppliers, means the integrity of their own networks are at stake. Finding these security weaknesses in e-commerce applications or online booking systems, for example, is highly attractive to hackers because of opportunities for identity theft or to issue ransomware that may damage the company’s sustainability.

    Hackers don’t just target the obvious bugs in applications. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks increasingly are aimed at an application rather than the network infrastructure, often making the application unavailable to legitimate users.

    Developers need to ensure they understand the importance of security and load testing over the application development life cycle. To deliver more secure products to market, it is essential to identify the aspects of development that can harness security faults and address these challenges with the time and financial support of C-suite and IT executives.

    Lack of Time for Security Testing

    Security defects must be avoided as much as possible. This requires intensive testing and the right tools. Time is precious, and time-to-market often is a critical success factor for new applications. For IT decision makers, it’s necessary to balance these security concerns and time pressures with an organization’s appetite for risk and its allocation of resources.

    In addition, IT leaders and developers need to look at the effectiveness and agility of their security testing. Agile software development decreases the period between software releases from months to days or even hours. It is widely acknowledged that the classical iterative, develop-test-develop process for troubleshooting takes too long, so it often is overlooked. As a result, security defects often still find their way into software versions and must be eliminated later, which drive costs higher. For example, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the cost per defect in the development stage is US$80, but quickly jumps to US$960 per defect in the testing stage and US$7,600 in production. NIST estimates that these costs amount to almost US$60 billion annually in the United States alone.

    Developers are widely aware of the growing challenges with security testing. In a recent Ixia survey of 363 developers, a clear majority of respondents nominated security testing as the most critical component of the development cycle. In fact, 93 percent report they subject their applications to security testing during the development process early, and continuously. And yet, two-thirds of the respondents admitted to delivering products with bugs and/or security flaws. Whether this is because of a lack of time, appropriate tools or financial support, this can put application security and functionality and an organization’s network at risk. Subsequently, eliminating these defects with patches or updates is at least four times more expensive than addressing them during development.

    Test Early, Often and Under Real Conditions

    A range of comprehensive security testing solutions are emerging to integrate security testing more closely with the development cycle. These solutions give developers powerful and comprehensive test environments to monitor application behavior carefully in response to DDoS attacks, malicious traffic and automated attacks, which lets developers identify bugs or vulnerabilities at the encoding stage. These tools also generate realistic traffic for load and safety tests to simulate a wide range of protocol mixes and traffic patterns. In addition, these solutions include development tools such as integrated debuggers that import and replay recorded packet captures.

    By using REST APIs and a rich command line interface, these integrated security testing solutions work with a range of continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) frameworks. These agile CI/CD frameworks streamline discovery and resolution of issues found in different phases of the application development life cycle.

    These solutions also streamline communication and reporting within multifunction teams via a range of community features such as referrals, real-time feedback and task allocation. Using a completely virtualized solution also lets developers improve security testing across the application life cycle while minimizing any hardware or infrastructure investments. Plus, the agile CI/CD model helps disparate teams across the service provider—QA, production, development and vendor collaborate effectively and streamline discovery and resolution of issues found in different phases to accelerate the time to market.

    The ability to increase the development team’s agility and speed while improving application security is making many IT decision makers sit up and take notice. With company boards requiring IT departments to respond more quickly and effectively to technology opportunities, IT leaders are seeing the benefits of this new way of working that combines the twin priorities of agility and security.

    Developer teams should communicate clearly with IT executives to secure the required time, money and resources to ensure new applications and updates undergo rigorous and realistic tests before they are released to market to face the mercy of hackers. Using commercial tools and systems for security and load tests help to determine the behavior of applications under different stress loads. They also help developers deliver products to market in a more cost-effective, timely and agile manner.

    About the Author / Phil Trainor

    Phil Trainor headshotPhil Trainor is Head – Security Business, APAC at Ixia. Phil has worked in the network security industry for 14 years holding senior level engineering roles at California-based startups. He was recently a guest lecturer at the 2016 RSA Conference in Marina Bay Sands discussing ‘Advanced Persistent Threats’ and has also lectured at Blackhat, DefCon, ToorCon, and at many other prestigious security events.  Connect with him on LinkedIn.