Just a short note to make all aware of some upcoming webcasts. The content to be presented during these events should really help teams address their continuous testing and continuous deployment challenges.

 

Shift Left to better business results: Speed delivery of higher quality software.

October 15, 2014 - 1 pm ET

Many of today's organizations struggle to deliver quality software at the speed their users demand. Successful organizations are moving to a DevOps approach and shifting testing to the left. But what does a shift left approach to testing really mean? How can organizations begin the shift left process and realize the tremendous benefits that this approach has brought others? Join Glyn Rhodes, IBM Product Manager for Integration Testing and Service Virtualization solutions, as he demystifies what a shift left approach to testing is all about. Learn the common sense approach to getting started. Hear how others are benefiting from a test earlier; test continuously approach to software quality and reducing their testing cycles from weeks and months down to minutes and hours.

Attend and gain an understanding of:

• How can organizations shift testing to the left
• What continuous testing is all about
• ‹How test automation, service virtualization and continuous deployment fit together to achieve continuous delivery

Now available - On Demand playback. Click here to watch!

Join the IBM DevOps community and view the webcast slides.

 

Deliver Quality Software Faster: Eliminate Testing Bottlenecks

October 22, 2014 - 2 pm ET

Poorly managed and incomplete test labs and environments are a chronic drag on productivity, quality, and time to market. In a recent survey asking testers where they felt their time would be best spent, both “setting up test labs” and “creating test data” came in toward the bottom of the list. In a successful test environment, the infrastructure, application, and test data must be readily available. In order for this to happen, testers must know what they have on hand and be able to bring suggestions for improvement back to their teams so that the test environment is as similar to production as possible. 
 

Join us for this informative web seminar that details the role of automation in keeping your test environment healthy. Learn how to:

• Clean up your test environment
• Use service virtualization to test missing components
• Link deployment automation and test automation
• Automate application test and deployment with software-defined environments

Now available - On Demand playback. Click here to watch!
 

 

IBM Webcast: What SAP Testers really need

October 28, 2014 - 2 PM ET

The SAP landscape is continuously changing, as a result of, business process changes within the client company, changes to the system environment, changes to applications interfacing with SAP, changes to SAP modules from SAP, and a multitude of regulatory compliance mandates. As the complexity of your SAP implementation grows, conventional SAP testing techniques can cause testing costs to soar. Join Kay and Carsten as they discuss how to apply an effective approach to testing your SAP and non-SAP systems, and will showcase our proven SAP testing solutions highlighting test automation, test environments, and test management.

Kay Johnson is with the IBM Rational brand focussing on large scale Agile and DevOps transformation. This role includes helping clients understand the business value of adopting Agile/DevOps for SAP application development. Prior to this appointment, Kay worked for IBM's CHQ as a Development Effectiveness Consultant leading the strategic rollout of agile development methods to the CIO's organization of 8,000 project staff. This initiative included IBM's HR applications which run on SAP.

Carsten Siegler is technical lead for the Rational SAP Solution, driving the Rational SAP solution in IOT Europe. Before joining the Rational brand he was part of the C&SI WW Sales Enablement Team, fueling the IBM Service Management Solution for SAP. In his 18+ years experience in IBM SAP alliance, located in the IBM SAP International Competence Center in Walldorf, he adopted deep SAP DevOps skill. In his current position he focuses on selling the Rational SAP Solution, positioning the Rational SAP Suite in SAP ALM ecosystems, but also identifying new SAP DevOps solution opportunities.

 

Now available - On Demand playback. Click here to watch!

                   Click here to download the webcast slides.

 

 

IBM Webcast: Continuous Testing with Urban Code Deploy and Rational Test Workbench / Rational Test Virtualization Server

November 3, 2014 - 1 PM ET

Building a modern business application requires the integration of many services across many APIs both internal and external. Due to this increasing complexity, it is important that the testing of these complex systems also starts early as possible. Leaving the testing until the end of product delivery increases project risk and the cost of fixing any defects found during later development stage. Using the power of IBM's service-based testing and service virtualization capabilities combined with automated deployment, it is now possible to perform integration testing on every application build. For application components still under development, service virtualization allows integration testing to occur even earlier in the development cycle simulating the missing parts of the system. Service virtualization also allows driving of error scenarios from both internal and external systems that may be hard or even impossible to produce, even with the real systems.

Join Stephen Rowles, Architect for IBM Rational Integration Tester, as he explains how to enable Continuous Testing by combining Urban Code Deploy, Rational Integration Tester, and Rational Test Virtualization Server. 

Attend this session and gain an understanding of:
* The value of Continuous Testing
* The tools that can be used to perform Continuous Testing and Deployment
* How to use the tools to provide continuous system validation

Now available - On Demand playback. Click here to watch!

 

                     Click here to download the webcast slides.

 

IBM Webcast: Use Discovery to accelerate testing and virtualization (and find out dark secrets about your environment)

November 12, 2014 - 1 PM ET

Many of today's business applications offer a multitude of services (APIs) across many different technologies. These same applications also reach out into a web of already-existing services in order to retrieve and update information necessary to successfully deliver the end to end business processes. In many cases, these applications are being built by multiple development teams distributed around the world with architectural approaches and middleware changing over time and yet we point test teams at the mere tip of the iceberg and say, "Test it!". Testers know the benefits service-based testing and service virtualization bring but to successfully use these capabilities they first have to understand not only the application's architecture but also the way in which it communicates with everything around it. Finding this information can be a forensic-like exercise; even if there is documentation there is only one real truth - the environment itself. Watching and interrogating the real systems allows testers to understand what's really happening under the surface, sometimes with surprising results.

Join Nick Portalski, IBM Development Manager for Integration Testing and Service Virtualization solutions as he explains the rationale for using various discovery techniques and explains how their use can accelerate project initiation making it possible to reduce testing cycles and mitigate risk.

Gain an understanding of:
* The environmental challenges testers face when starting new projects and why this slows them down
* The different types of discovery a tester can use to gain an accurate understanding of the environment
* An understanding of how discovery can speed up testing

Now available - On Demand playback. Click here to watch!

 

IBM Webcast: Integration Testing and Service Virtualization in a WebSphere Environment

Dec 2, 2014 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM ET

Speakers: Stephen Rowles & Matt Lovett

Developing and testing complex middleware based applications is a difficult job. Services are developed, owned and run by many different teams including 3rd parties. Few projects are isolated; there will be a long list of dependencies that all need to be in place in order to develop and test satisfactorily. Setting up such environments is time-consuming and expensive which means it doesn't happen until late in the cycle at which point integration testing can go spectacularly wrong. As organisations move to a DevOps style of release this can cause a huge bottleneck in the pipeline.

Service virtualization gives developers and testers a way to deal with this. Simulations of downstream services can be quickly created and used to "shift left" integration testing back into the early development and test cycles. Services in test environments are simulated in a way that allows the test team to control responses and quickly test edge cases and failure conditions that would otherwise be too time consuming to do. Development teams can use the technology to create simulations of services that they need their code to use and also to quickly create smoke-test environments that allow automated integration tests to run. Overall, this approach significantly reduces risk and cuts release times.

Rational Test Workbench's integration to the WebSphere family (MQ, WAS, WSMB, WSRR) provides some unique capabilities to make this even easier for WebSphere developers.

Covering:
- What is service testing and virtualization and what are the benefits?
- What does a typical tester and developer get from service virtualization?
- Introduction to the toolset
- A walk through of the ways in which a WebSphere Dev team can use the tool (both general and specific WebSphere capabilities)
- A demonstration of building virtual services against a WebSphere environment [WAS and MQ]

Click here to register.

 

IBM Webcast: Integration Testing and Service Virtualization in an SAP environment

Dec 16, 2014 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM ET

Speakers: Nick Portalski & Glyn Rhodes

In years gone by SAP landscapes were very controlled, well understood and tightly coupled technical assets. Now days the demands from the business mean they operate in a far more distributed and highly integrated technology space where stakeholders of a business process can be both internal and external. We have to think of applications as the sum of their parts, and testing is no exception to this rule. 

With complex, distributed systems the primary risk is integration. Or rather, integration failures late in the cycle causing delays and slippages. SAP systems are designed to talk to other systems; those other systems could also be SAP, or they could be components delivered by other vendors, or even systems that do not reside within your enterprise. Organizations need to test these integrations as early as possible and as continuously as possible. However, what we have is a tapestry of differing standards, overlapping testing schedules, conflicting methodologies and contention around test environments. 

In this session, we will go through a variety of scenarios that illustrate the value of integration testing and service virtualization in the SAP domain. This session will cover ECC, PI, IDocs and RFCs among others. Attendees will benefit from a new perspective on SAP testing that allows for Shift Left and DevOps principles to be applied.

Click here to register.

 

To learn more about how IBM can help teams begin testing earlier and to test continuously, visit ibm.biz/continuoustesting

Tags:  shift-left continuous-testing integration-testing continuous-delivery continuous-deployment test-automation devops