Ixia transforms development lifecycle for Software Developers

Ixia , announced the addition of Ixia Developer to its comprehensive portfolio of testing solutions. Ixia Developer is an agile application performance and security resilience tool. It helps developers find bugs early, transforming the development lifecycle, reducing software development risks and costs, and speeding time to deployment.

The Agile Development Trend

Agile development is rapidly becoming business critical, as the time from development to deployment is no longer measured in months, but days or even hours. As such, despite early and continuous testing, products often contain bugs and vulnerabilities that slip through the cracks. In fact, according to the NIST, the annual cost incurred by these vulnerabilities in the U.S. alone is about $59.6 bn1.

Ixia Developer Reduces Costs; Speeds Time to Market

Ixia Developer tackles this problem head on. It generates rich and realistic application traffic along with malicious attacks and automated threats, enabling agile developers to find bugs and vulnerabilities as they write code. Ixia Developer also offers developer-specific functionality, such as a comprehensive built-in debugger, and the ability to import and replay packet captures.

“We really like Ixia Developer, not just because it has many built in debugging and traffic generation capabilities, but its ease of use and VM based-deployment has made adoption by our engineers much easier,” said Aria Eslambolchizadeh, Executive Director Quality Engineering, at SonicWALL. “Ixia Developer has enabled our developers to do the testing themselves, saving valuable time in fixing issues. In addition, the traffic generator has helped both our developers and QA Engineers to validate bugs, while proving the real application monitoring capabilities of our security devices. This is critical for SonicWALL’s network security devices.”

Further, it is easy to automate or embed Ixia Developer in continuous integration or continuous deployment (CI/CD) frameworks using REST APIs and a rich command line interface. The agile CI/CD model is most effective when disparate teams across service provider, QA, production, development, and vendor can streamline discovery and resolution of issues found in different phases, accelerating time to market.

Ixia Developer customers can also access built-in community features. These include referring colleagues and providing real-time feedback, while receiving monthly updates. As a fully virtualized solution, Ixia Developer can be deployed in minutes. It also eliminates the need for costly hardware investments from the desktop, to the laptop, to the data center, and to the cloud.

Sunil Kalidindi, Vice President of Product Management at Ixia, said “The need for speed is understandable, but quality shouldn’t be sacrificed in the process. Ixia Developer allows agile development and comprehensive, automated testing to happen in tandem—presenting the most realistic situations for the best understanding of potential bugs and vulnerabilities in any development cycle.”

Developer Survey Finds the Tool Makes the Test

A recent survey conducted by Ixia of 363 developers found that 95 percent of respondents run at least five security and load tests during the application development process. However, 65 percent admit to deploying products with bugs and 31 percent said products harbored significant vulnerabilities that required patching later in the cycle. In addition, although 56 percent of respondents claimed that security testing is the most important component of the application development process, 39 percent do not currently use commercial developer test tools for applications and security.

“As DevOps continues to pervade into mainstream IT, it's becoming imperative to broaden the testing mindset to include security, which increases IT agility while lowering the impact of vulnerabilities,” said Donnie Berkholz, Research Director for Development, DevOps, & IT Ops at 451 Research. “Unfortunately though, most companies do not yet fully integrate comprehensive security testing earlier in the software lifecycle but instead consider it far too late in the process, even with the most mission-critical applications.”