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Parasoft's service virtualization removes the following performance testing roadblocks:
Emulating realistic performance for dependent applications
A staged testing environment often lacks access to the breadth of dependent applications associated with an application under test (AUT). This constraint is compounded for performance testers since staged testing environments traditionally lack the computing resources required to deliver realistic performance scenarios. More commonly, you have a limited degree of control over how the component behaves and can test only a limited range of behavior conditions (for example, the current actual response time, but not peak response time or failures). This leads to incomplete testing and exposure to significant business risks.
With Parasoft Virtualize, the performance of each emulated component mimics the actual component's historical performance, and can be adjusted with the click of a button to check various "what if" scenarios—providing a fast and easy way to apply the various performance profiles needed to truly exercise the AUT.
Accessing constrained components at convenient times—without exorbitant costs
Staged test environment access is usually tightly-scheduled and granted at limited and inconvenient time windows, such as 2 am to 4 am on Saturday morning. Moreover, transaction and bandwidth fees involved in accessing third-party systems/services, shared test environments, or mainframes can quickly escalate—especially for large-scale, high-throughput load or stress tests.
With Parasoft Virtualize, the behavior of constrained components can be captured as virtual assets, then performance tests can run against the virtual asset rather than a live or staged asset. These virtual assets can be accessed without scheduling issues and without incurring access fees.
Standing up different environment permutations
Test plans commonly require that tests be exercised against a number of different environment scenarios. For instance,
the same performance test might need to be run against a component's ideal, average, and slowest response time specified in a SLA.
And to truly assess the AUT's performance, the test plan might call for the test to run with all possible permutations
of dependent component behaviors.
Parasoft's Environment Manager simplifies this process. From Environment Manager's intuitive graphical interface,
testers can direct which state (real or virtual, which performance profiles, which data sources, etc.) a dependent
component should adopt in any instance. Environment Manager also enables rapid, simple creation of test environments
with all necessary permutations of dependent component behaviors. Within Environment Manager, testers can select
the specific environment instances they need, then instantly provision the environment that allows them to immediately
start testing. There's no need to wait for Ops/ DevOps.
Subjecting third-party components to extreme loads
It's quite often unfeasible to hit various components at the level typically needed for effective load/stress tests.
For example, you might need to test your AUT against high-volume load tests simulating peak conditions—but how
do you proceed if your end-to-end transactions pass through a third-party service that charges per-transaction access
fees or bandwidth fees?
If your performance tests pass through a component that you cannot (or do not want to) subject to extreme load testing conditions,
Parasoft Virtualize enables you to capture its behavior under a low-volume test (e.g., a single user transaction), adjust the captured
performance criteria as desired, then perform all subsequent load testing against that virtualized component instead of the actual asset.
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