Large Retail & Commercial Bank Delivers Features 40% More Efficiently With Service Virtualization

The Challenges

Speed is key for the retail and commercial bank, but there were many impediments to achieving their CI/CD and DevOps goals. One of the key challenges was the lack of mainframe availability and the high cost of using that environment for testing new applications dependent on those critical services. They also needed to run performance tests without impacting the production environment.

The team surveyed all product development teams across the organization to quantify the challenges they needed to solve. They related any downtime or delays to the following:

• Lack of data availability
• Outages
• Incomplete APIs
• Environments that are inaccessible

The team found that the average downtime and delay was about five days per month per dev team, which was deemed much too high and needed to be reduced drastically across product teams.

The Approach

To address their ability to test complex scenarios, they knew they needed to bring in a data and service virtualization solution to plug these gaps and bring stability to their environments. One of the key goals was to allow product teams to be able to test their applications in isolation, much earlier in the development cycle. They knew if they could do this, they could enable the teams to deliver features to customers faster.

The Solution

After an in-depth evaluation, the bank selected the Parasoft service virtualization solution for proof of concept. It was a smashing success and was rolled out to the team to use during production.

The team’s lead engineer didn’t waste any time providing value to the product teams at the retail and commercial bank. They started with a mortgage product team and in just a few days they were able to start testing with custom data during development much earlier in the release cycle than previous releases.

In this first feature release, they found nine early-stage defects that wouldn’t have been found until much later in the pipeline or even in production. It was deemed an immediate success.

“Stopping those defects from getting into production saved the impact from the customers and protects the reputation of the bank as well.”

—Lead engineer at the large retail and commercial bank

The Results

By using service virtualization, the large bank eliminated the dependency on waiting for APIs to be developed before writing automation scripts. They also identified and eliminated defects during development. The results?

• Faster development
• Reduced cost of testing the applications

“With Parasoft, we’re able to achieve the goal to create virtualized services from the specifications and generate synthetic data to inject into the services. Before the teams even start development, we have a virtual version of what the API is going to be. From that, we can already start writing tests for it.”

—Lead engineer at the large retail and commercial bank

The bank has done an in-depth analysis of features delivered with Parasoft Virtualize in play and those without service virtualization. The teams leveraging service virtualization are 40% more efficient in feature delivery from start to customer delivery.

Other results include over six million transactions completed in eight months with a recent peak week of 1 million transactions in a single week. They have virtualized over 100 services and thousands of datasets.