New Rational-Tivoli integration delivers faster, better software builds

Software testing is a logical intersection of IT development and IT operations

Tivoli Beat. A weekly IBM service management perspective Increasingly, as technical infrastructures become optimized to fulfill business strategies, it's growing obvious that integration across operations and development can play an important role. By linking these two domains so that they function in close tandem, overall costs can be minimized while other business benefits, such as speed and efficiency, often accrue simultaneously.

One illustration of the business value of such cross-domain integration lies in software testing. For organizations with a software development arm, thoroughly testing the software prior to its release is absolutely critical to ensuring that it is both as feature-complete and as bug-free as it can reasonably be.

Creating and maintaining the test environment in which that process takes place, however, is no easy feat. Enterprise-class test labs will often have dozens or even hundreds of servers, both real and virtual; each must be configured with the appropriate software stack for testing purposes. Specifically, this means that each must have an appropriate package of operating system, applications, data files, middleware and of course the relevant software being tested. Furthermore, it's essential that these packages be as consistent as possible from test iteration to test iteration. If the test servers vary across the testing process, the testing results will certainly be compromised—possibly even invalidated—because discovered bugs may not actually apply in the expected conditions.

Yet manually provisioning these servers over and over again can lead to many problems. Such an approach is slow, which means the software testing process is in turn slow and the overall time required to arrive at a release candidate increases. Furthermore, when servers are provisioned manually, the chance of inadvertent errors in configuration increases and these errors can easily threaten the validity of the testing process, essentially defeating the purpose.

A comprehensive solution to the test lab management conundrum

Fortunately, IBM now offers two tools—IBM Rational Test Lab Manager and IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager—which, together, form an optimized solution designed to solve exactly these problems. Thanks to their tight integration, software test managers are empowered to streamline the testing process, improve its accuracy, reduce operational and development costs and, in short, benefit the organization by helping the team deliver better software—faster.

How do they achieve these impressive business wins? IBM Rational Test Lab Manager (RTLM) serves as an overall management system to orchestrate the testing process. Using it, software development teams can connect the software build process to the testing process in a clean and efficient way; the tool centralizes the control of test lab assets, whether on literal servers or virtual servers running in environments such as IBM Xen.

This means software test managers are always aware of which software assets are deployed on which servers, and can easily and quickly implement changes to suit changing requirements. They can also search for, request, and reserve lab assets on demand, thus integrating test lab activities into the quality management lifecycle in a manner corresponding to industry best practices.

Even complex testing labs with hundreds of servers can be more comprehensively and straightforwardly managed—minimizing the overall costs, the time to prepare servers and the time to test builds—while also simplifying management more generally through a consolidated interface.

The business outcome is the time required to develop a thoroughly-tested release candidate shrinks. According to some estimates, in fact, RTLM will save many organizations 30 to 40 percent of the overall testing time they currently require to evaluate builds. And because builds are tested more efficiently, the time needed to arrive at a strong release candidate also falls.

Tivoli Provisioning Manager: Optimized for server installations

Of course, RTLM represents only part of the story here. Central to its performance, and driving most of its core provisioning functions, is the fact that in the latest rendition (version eight) RTLM integrates directly with another tool: IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM).

This enterprise-class offering was specifically created to simplify, automate and accelerate exactly the kind of mass software provisioning that's required in testing labs. It accomplishes this via several core features. First, TPM is image-driven; this means administrators can manually create a core software build for a server once, create a digital image (snapshot) of it and then store that image in a library.

Once stored, it can then be deployed automatically across the network to any target system, whether virtual or literal, via scripts for maximum consistency of the install process and minimum supervision by IT staff members. Then, it can be modified with any special software, such as patches or drivers, as may be needed to customize it for a given purpose.

For maximum utility among enterprise customers, TPM supports several different leading operating systems, such as various flavors of Windows and Linux, which have very different install processes. Yet it also has the effect of abstracting out all the details of the software install process in each case, essentially leaving administrators only to worry about which software to install on a given server—not how to install them.

Connecting the dots between test lab management and software provisioning

So how do RTLM and TPM integrate? In the latest version of RTLM, TPM is treated essentially as a plug-in. This plug-in delivers cross-solution functionality that drives all the core provisioning functions; thus, RTLM leverages the proven performance and best-in-class feature set of TPM to ensure that target servers are always provisioned with the appropriate test environments.

Because TPM is highly efficient, this translates into an exceptionally agile test lab, in which the same servers can be used repeatedly to test different application builds against different software environments. Despite this, however, the accuracy of the testing process remains uncompromised, because TPM also delivers completely consistent software provisioning. The overall business wins, in terms of speed and cost reductions, are tremendous as a result.

Furthermore, the information flow also works in reverse—and generates still more business value as a result. Specifically, RTLM can pull lab inventory data from TPM. The upshot of this is that lab managers are continually apprised of the state (that is, the software assets installed on) testing servers at any given point. And because this information is collected automatically through technology, rather than through a manual inventory, it arrives more quickly and more accurately, and can be leveraged in turn to facilitate software testing with more confidence than if it had been collected by staff members.

Thus, through the bi-directional information flow between RTLM and TPM, we find that costs fall, software testing is both accelerated and rendered more accurate, and quality software builds can be created and released more quickly—the big-picture, bottom-line business goal of any software testing process.