A virtual deployment testing environment for enterprise software systems

Modern enterprise software systems often need to interact with a large number of heterogeneous systems in an enterprise IT environment. The distributedness, large-scale-ness, and heterogeneity of such environment makes it difficult to test a system's quality attributes such as performance and scalability before it is actually deployed in the environment. In this paper, we present a Coloured Petri nets (CPN) based system behaviour emulation approach and a lightweight virtual testing framework for provisioning the deployment testing environment of an enterprise system so that its quality attributes, especially scalability, can be evaluated without physically connecting to the real production environment. This testing environment is scalable and has a flexible pluggable architecture to support the emulation of the behaviour of heterogeneous systems in the environment. To validate the feasibility of this approach, a CPN emulation model for LDAP has been developed and applied in testing the scalability of a real-life identity management system. An in-lab performance study has been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.