Reasons to Appreciate Service Virtualization

Service Virtualization helps to test earlier, faster and with more test coverage. It helps to reduce the risk of business interruption in today’s highly interconnected system by facilitating testing across a complex set of applications such as mainframes, third party services, etc., through a simulated test environment that eliminates dependency constraints.

The following reasons can be listed in order to be thankful to Service Virtualization.

• Service Virtualization helps in significantly reducing the CapEx and OpEx associated with test infrastructure. While testing complex software applications, there is always a need of setting up simulated environments. Extending such staged environments is extremely costly. Additionally, the OpEx associated with the simulated environment is a significantly deterrent compared to the total cost of ownership. A Service Virtualization strategy and its simulation capabilities delivers control to the end users and eliminates the need for superfluous hardware.
• With migration towards the cloud, SaaS and composite applications, testing dependencies have increased to a great extent. Service Virtualization strategies enable developers and testers control over these dependencies. This is enabled by providing a flexible access to the complete test environment and help the team in identifying evolving conditions of the environment
• Testing now has become an iterative process in the development phase. Evolving systems most often limit the test coverage that needs to be carried out. Also, accessing a realistic test environment delays testing. Simulating test environments through Service Virtualization helps to eliminate these dependencies by providing a realistic and complete test environment on-demand, thus enabling test iterations to be completed.
• The variable performance of mobile apps across different provider networks is one of the biggest concerns around mobile applications. Service Virtualization helps to simulate network performance, including latency, error conditions, etc., enabling a broad test coverage under real-world conditions.
• Getting an early access to simulated test environments helps to uncover critical security, performance and reliability issues early on when they are easier and cheaper to fix. Service Virtualization helps in this early detection of errors resulting in more test coverage and increasing the probability of meeting budget and schedule targets. Performance Testing has got broader with Service Virtualization. Its simulated test environments not only allow for a discrete independent control over each endpoint, but also enable various permutations to be customized in order to represent variable loads from dependent systems.
• Delaying the testing phase until the end of a project runs a risk of missed deadlines and costly error fixings. Simulated environments provided by Service Virtualization enables continuous testing much earlier in the Software Development Life Cycle. This helps in reducing exposure risks significantly.
• While developing and testing, the system environment needs to be properly manipulated, which accounts for a lot of time and effort. As the project deadline approaches, the work required often becomes prohibitive and results in incomplete testing. Service Virtualization makes it fast and easy to alter the behavior of the dependant systems, thus making it possible to address a broad array of scenarios.
• When the regular test environment is finally available to the testers, it is usually limited and lacks the applications, which are beyond the organization’s control. Service Virtualization enables the testing team to access all the relevant application dependencies by simulating a complete test environment on demand.

Conclusion

Service Virtualization is now being used by more and more organizations to improve productivity, reducing test costs and deploy higher quality software applications within time. By helping to eliminate all the software testing constraints, a service virtualization strategy helps in gaining a competitive advantage in the market.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.