Governing Services

Appvance IQ is architected to the surface performance, interoperability, and functional issues in service environments. It should be natural to expect that Appvance runs as a service itself.

Governing Services Using Registry/Repository And Test Automation

Software developers, QA technicians, and IT managers are learning how SOA governance and test automation tools benefit their organization's ability to develop, manage and deliver services to determine quality levels. Examples of these governance platforms include SoftwareAG's X-Registry, BEA AquaLogic Enterprise Repository, and IONA Repository. Appvance publishes a commercial test automation tool that when combined with the power of an SOA repository delivers SOA governance benefits. Appvance IQ delivers an inter-operability mechanism between the Appvance test automation run-time and a repository platform:

Delivers immediate useful test automation functions to governance platform users

Provides metadata for services being governed, including service up / down status, time-since-last-failure data, service deployment correct validation status, and service reliability history

Provides a mechanism to do service monitoring, scalability, and performance tests managed by a governance platform

Provides a widely-adopted test API, test runtime environment, and test development toolkit to governance platform users

An SOA governance platform provides controls and functions enabling enterprises to manage a set of interdependent information services. From the developer's perspective, a governance platform gives a developer a way to discover a service that implements a particular function which therefore won't need to be written. In an SOA context, governance adds a registry, enabling developers to search for services, a database of metadata about the services' qualities, and a set of policies to control the service's use at development and deployment time. For example, a policy attached to a service creating new employee email accounts requires a developer to also use service authorizing requests. Inter-operability between a governance and test automation platform, an example policy says, "You must run a test script successfully to verify this service is correctly configured before deploying this service to a production environment". In this inter-operability, the governance tool manages policies, stores the functional tests scripts, issues a call for Appvance to run a test, and saves the results as metadata for the service entry in the repository. The inter-operability provides a way to accomplish "test by policy" methods.