CA Technologies is developing the strategy of LISA, an innovative platform that creates virtual environments for automated testing and development of applications even in the cloud. The platform takes care of the necessary services to virtualize applications by simulating their dynamic behavior, their data and their performance. LISA is an end-to-end solution that provides automation for all types of testing: unit testing, functional, integration, regression, load and performance. It also allows you to identify anomalies and defects of applications without requiring manual intervention.

Extending the LISA capabilities to the next level, CA Technologies announced the latest version of its suite–CA LISA 7.1–to address most critical DevOps challenges. The new release includes Server Virtualization for developers to test new applications in simulated environment. The new release also includes CA LISA Pathfinder, a data mining offering that provides business workflow information to development and test teams.

LISA 7.1 aims to improve the DevOps methodology support to help clients to improve the development and application deployment and accelerate the process of innovation. LISA Service Virtualization reduces or eliminates constraints or barriers such as limited availability of laboratories and systems, software and test data. CA LISA Pathfinder provides IT department best models of real-world environments for developing and testing applications, using information arising from both development and production.

“As enterprises try to innovate, IT organizations are looking to implement DevOps strategies, which help foster collaboration between the teams that create and test applications (Dev) with those that maintain them in production environments (Ops),” the company said. “The solution supports these DevOps strategies by optimizing the application development process.”

IT managers know that the service virtualization can help to speed up the development of projects and to improve the quality of applications. Companies that aim to avoid investing in expensive hardware infrastructure, creating virtual environments offer a cost effective measure. According to the company, CA LISA has been shown to reduce time-to-market by 24 percent and production defects by 22 percent while allowing to test nearly 45 percent more application code.

In the process of development and provision of applications, LISA 7.1 brings enhanced SAP support for older, legacy implementations; support to IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS) transaction gateway (CTG) to trace and virtualize transactions through mainframe CICS; enhanced enterprise dashboard to view large deployments and 40 new features including SWIFT, JSON, EDI protocols support.

In 2011, CA Technologies acquired ITKO to enhance its service virtualization business.  Earlier this year the company acquired Nolio to strengthen a related offering, CA LISA Release Automation. Customers who have large development projects and who are looking at software development, deployment, and management, LISA provides the best platform for application release operations, enabling continuous releases across the application lifecycle.