xFIT

SOA has ensured that business functions remain agile and responsive while accommodating a myriad of technology transformations in IT. But the responsibility of testing a specific SOA application falls squarely on the tester who has to figure out the mode of testing, the order and associated interdependencies with that application. This task becomes very tedious since new services are often created quickly and with no consistent foundation to work with. Moreover any update to a single service can require a suite of hundreds of tests to validate that the new service works and interacts properly with other services. Therefore, automation of SOA testing is the only way to keep pace with a SOA deployment.

There are several SOA tools in the market that support testing - those that support a testing process from beginning to end (are a part of a development process, supporting requirements, test cases, and test automation); and those that support automation of testing (typically, a script that can be run to validate the response).

In the first case, the automation is not so important - the process of testing is. In the second case, tools such as mercury interactive, test runner, or load runner provide the testing automation - a mechanism to develop and run the script. HCL's xFIT supports a customizable testing process as well as automation of testing. This automated agent based test harness for SOA and BPM testing is known as xFIT. It is used to enable middleware product testing and development of adapters & connectors for different middleware products.

At the recent FSO Excellence Awards, HCL emerged a clear winner in the Technology Innovation category. To select the winner for this category, truly differentiating business attributes like global scale of the innovation and uniqueness in the market were considered.

"HCL's xFIT^TM innovation interested us in particular. This start to finish process and functional testing solution stood out for its ability to be customized for any environment."

- CEO, FSO

HCL's xFIT: An efficient alternative to homegrown frameworks

Consider the scenario where a company wants to test its backend applications. None of the tools that they see in the market will do the job to support their unique needs. In this case, xFIT can do the following:

1. Gather requirements from the company - these requirements will take advantage of the unique strengths of the company and address its challenges
2. Customize xFIT - there are two dimensions to this customization - technical, where xFIT develops the libraries to make it suitable for the target environment; and process support, where xFIT will add tools to support the processes in the company
3. Train the testers - to make xFIT useful, HCL develops training material suited to the local environment, drawn from real test cases
4. Support xFIT - support as long as required, to make enhancements, fix bugs and incorporate new releases

In short, xFIT is a framework, supported by a dedicated team, which can be used by regular testers.

Types of services testing performed by xFIT

• Black-box testing
• Integration testing (includes complex orchestrations and EAI scenarios)
• Stress testing and integrated stress testing
• Automated schedule testing for backend services
• Pre-release testing of services and EAI applications
• Sanity testing of version changes and upgrades

A case in point showcasing business benefits accrued by using xFIT

A leading investment bank automates services testing using HCL's xFIT

• xFIT reduced services testing effort from 43 man days to 3 man days!
• xFIT successfully enabled MiFID Compliance Project related services testing

HCL's xFIT - Key Value Propositions

• Establishes common framework for SOA and Integration Test automation
• Separation of test case flow from details, allows test developers to:
  • Focus on automation of test cases
  • Delegate and reuse effort needed to figure out details specific to each endpoint
• Portability of test suites from testbed to testbed facilitates use by those who were not involved in test development (e.g. solution developers)
• Reinforces Best Practices
• Capturing of manual test results