SOA in 2011: HP’s ALM Updates Target Dev/Test, Management for SOA, Cloud 
HP continues to build out modules for its Application Lifecycle Management 11 tools suite to make SOA and cloud developers more efficient. The updates aim to accelerate and reduce costs for testing, improve agility of code updates and improve managed collaboration among teams – even across multiple development environments.
"Managers tell us all the time, ‘I need to know if we will hit our [development] schedule " Kelly Emo 
HP continues to build out modules for its Application Lifecycle Management 11 tools suite to make SOA and cloud developers more efficient. The updates aim to accelerate and reduce costs for testing, improve agility of code updates and promote more managed collaboration among teams – even across multiple development environments.
In specific, HP has released three new ALM modules – Service Virtualization, Application Lifecycle Intelligence and Agile Accelerator 5.0. The new additions will better automate the application delivery process – including pre-production and readiness, Kelly Emo, director of product marketing for HP's Applications Portfolio, told IDN. The new HP offerings also will provide eye-popping granular visibility to a wide range of stakeholders including business analysts, developers and testers, she added.
While the move to loose-coupled SOA and composite applications can drive agility, getting the code from design to deployment can often create crippling challenges for organizations, Emo said. Teams are struggling to quickly deliver applications, while still managing quality, performance and security risks within heterogeneous development environments.
As with many multi-product announcements, HP’s ALM updates add up to more than the sum of their parts. Emo painted the big picture this way:
“The world today has many good point solutions that work for one or two tasks, they only deliver partial lifecycle management,” Emo told IDN. “And that means you can get 75% of what you need to know. But with highly-distributed teams and developers using multiple toolsets that’s not enough. Managers want that whole environment to be brought together, and that’s what we’re doing with an integrated framework based on open standards.”
Here’s a look at HP’s latest offerings in more detail.
HP Service Virtualization 1.0 – Reduces complexity and business risks of application testing by providing a simulated environment that organizations can use to test the performance of SOA and composite applications.
The simulated environment eliminates the need to build a redundant test environment, access production systems or recreate a proxy to mimic service behaviors. This lets devs simply call a WSDL supplied by the outside providers, such as for billing, shipping or such services. This WSDL is the identical interface the tested service would call, but no charges are incurred.
“Service virtualization is another key extension of how virtualizing can save IT lots of money,” Emo told IDN. “This module speeds up the ability for developer teams to test and deliver accurate code, and avoid all the expense that can be incurred if they were to test their code against the real active service.” Additionally, service virtualization also means that devs can keep to their own schedules, because they won’t have to wait for permission to test against an internal service, Emo added.
Director of Product Marketing
HP
ALI is aimed directly at easing one of the biggest headaches faced by development managers today, Emo told IDN. “Managers tell us all the time, ‘I need to know if we will hit our schedule and I don’t have that single view of all my different components, especially as defined by my requirements,’” she said. “ALI does all that and when we show it to customers, they stop the demo right there and ask us when they can get it.”
HP Agile Accelerator 5.0 The long-standing Agile Accelerator has been updated with a new scheduling tool for viewing deliverables in development. It also provides real-time visibility across the application lifecycle for rapid response to changing business requirements.
HP Agile Accelerator, which sits on top of HP ALM 11 or HP Quality Center, lets users manage agile projects without a separate agile-specific tool. It provides a single, unified means of structuring sprints and tracking agile team progress. To speed development and reduce confusion among team members, it also provides pre-built user roles, workflows, and configurations to let teams more rapidly adopt and manage agile projects. It will also better leverage sprint planning, backlog/user story/task definition, and issue capture.
HP’s latest updates for ALM are also geared to help migrate conventional on-premise SOA and composite applications to the cloud, Emo said, noting an IDC study that predicts by next year some 85 percent of new applications will be specifically designed to be accessed in the cloud. To meet this transformation, IT organizations require a unified platform that automates and manages the delivery of cloud and composite applications, she added.
