Friday, March 12, 2010

eValid and Agile Methods

We have been asked recently by a number of eValid users and potential users to comment about how eValid fits into a "Agile Method" development environment?

Here are the the Wikipedia descriptions for Agile Software Development and the closely related description of Internet-Speed Development.

Obviously this is a very complex topic, but the way these methods differ from the traditional (and more formal) Waterfall Model of software development is that "Agile" methods allow the software development to "break the process loop" and focus on results, rather than holding up progress pending completion of various process steps and creation of required documentation.

In other words, that results count as much or more than plans or hopes or dreams. That having something actually WORKING could be a very good thing to have happen!

In that context, then, we think eValid as a test engine fits very well into the notion of an Agile Method because it allows all of these:

  1. Easy and quick creation of functional test that can be used to demonstrate and validation OK operation. This is the eValid record/playback paradigm.
  2. Easy and quick "lifting" of these tests into realistic server loading experiments that can validate capacity on 100's of simulated users. This is eValid's LoadTest mode.
  3. Sideways conversion of functional tests into RIA Monitoring. Here you would be provisioning scripts for regularly scheduled, batch mode data collection.
  4. Selective drop of functional tests into your regression test suite. eValid's eV.Manager does this pretty much automatically.

That's pretty agile, isn't it?

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