Infrastructure Test Optimization (ITO) encompasses a set of practices and tools that improve the entire Test Lifecycle, including test orchestration, collaboration, and productivity. Organizations that apply ITO are rewarded with better visibility, traceability and realism in their testing. And they increase collaboration and productivity within their test operations. Ultimately, organizations that adopt ITO derive greater business value through better testing.
ITO Practice Areas
- Emulation and analysis
- Test automation
- Manual and developer testing
- Quality management
- Lifecycle virtualization
Spirent Solutions
Spirent’s infrastructure testing solutions help improve testing efficiency while validating performance, availability, security and scalability:
- Spirent iTest automates testing processes to accelerate system and device testing
- Spirent iTest Team Server enables more efficient testing by providing organizations with a platform for sharing information and working together in teams
- Global Services helps carriers and enterprises accelerate development and deployment by maximizing your investment in Spirent infrastructure testing solutions
Practice areas are at the core of ITO. Along with guidance through expert services, they help build a complete, cohesive and collaborative platform to enable optimization of infrastructure testing.
As shown in the diagram, ITO encompasses five primary practice areas: Emulation and analysis, test automation, manual & developer testing, quality management and lifecycle virtualization. The practice areas collaborate through common, shareable and reusable test assets. Collaborative effort through improved communication between and across practice areas is supported and encouraged. Finally, practice areas may also be complemented by professional and expert services. Together, these elements of ITO enable an organization to test their infrastructures in a holistic and integrated manner and, in the end, help drive business value and innovation.
Emulation & Analysis
Reproducing real-world networks and/or actively simulating real users on the network to ensure infrastructures meet design requirements including: Verification of conformance to networking standards, meeting performance of functional requirements, and measuring performance under load at scale.
Test Automation
Using tools to establish test pre-conditions, efficiently developing and executing tests, providing in depth reporting, comparing actual versus predicted test outcomes, providing in depth reporting, and handling lights-out regression testing.
Manual & Developer Testing
Testing of the software by developers to verify functionality of new capabilities. Includes manual testing and also establishes documentation as a pre-cursor to QA testing.
Quality Management
Using tools to link business requirements to test cases, efficiently managing previously specified tests and resources, and tracking defects. Assets under management may include requirements, physical/virtual/lab resources, reports, metrics and defects.
Lifecycle Virtualization
Providing on-demand access to critical resources needed for testing such as: Environments, servers, devices, databases, defects etc.
Organizations adopting ITO practices are not just looking for new methodologies or tools to implement them. They want to improve the entire test lifecycle, including test orchestration, collaboration and productivity. They look to ITO for specific benefits that include:
Visibility
Provides tools for a detailed drill-down into the quality environment. Helps provide data for analysis to make informed release-based decisions.
Traceability
Helps correlate activities across the entire infrastructure test workflow. This enables full lifecycle versioning and complete traceability from requirements and tests, to defects and remediation.
Collaboration
Provides sharing of knowledge, activities and test assets. This enables teams involved in a common task to achieve their goals more effectively. Collaboration also includes centralized data management, workflow management and shared documentation.
Realism
Ensures that infrastructure test stimulus is based on real world conditions. This includes accurately emulating network traffic and simulating real users consuming services.
Integration
Enables interoperability with all the discrete elements in the infrastructure. This allows authoring of highly repeatable, integrated tests, and end-to-end orchestration through workflow automation.
Productivity
Offers productivity gains through embedded test expertise, improved collaboration, integrated test orchestration, optimum test execution, and efficient utilization of resources.
