PSCU Accelerates Unit Test Generation by 100% With Simulated Test Environments

The Challenge

The world of software architecture has evolved.

“We’re now in the century of connected architecture, where organization A uses applications hosted and managed by organization B, which in turn uses services from organization C. In real life, this chain can be much bigger than just three organizations. It can also be three different departments or teams within the same organization. The point here is dependency. With cloud-based systems, the first thing we learn is that we need to build software that’s resilient. It must be as resilient to all failures as possible.”

—Hirakant Shet, Manager of Integration Services at PSCU

These kinds of dependencies on third-party systems not only created additional steps in the SDLC but also made it impossible for the development team to fully test all scenarios. Additionally, PSCU continues to expand its business capabilities and its consumer domain. These recent expansions required the development team to re-examine the way they approach software testing.

PSCU’s API platform incorporates a lot of third-party APIs and other elements that affect software testing. Shet discovered that third-party data providers and third-party hosted elements posed the biggest challenge to make the API Delivery channel successful.

In some environments, the PSCU development team could not go beyond 30% code coverage because they could not generate all the unit test cases required for testing.

The Approach

Creating an easier and more streamlined workflow for testing stood out as Shet’s primary goal for the development team. Testing in production should not be how you find serious issues with software.

With the goals of reducing time to market, increasing test robustness, and reducing dependency on third-party environments in mind, Shet and his team looked for solutions that could help them address their concerns.

The Solution

The PSCU team landed on Parasoft’s service virtualization solution as the avenue to achieve their goals. The consistent and exceptional technical support from Parasoft played a pivotal role in Shet’s selection of service virtualization as the solution for his team. But the technical aspects of the solution also played a major part. Shet describes Parasoft Virtualize as an evolution of mock testing and test stubs.

Parasoft Virtualize provides the following:

1. Reduces testing required thereby reducing development time.
2. Reduces third-party component dependence.
3. Establishes a common vocabulary that all teams can understand.
4. Supports various protocols.
5. Records traffic that can be used to generate virtual assets automatically.
6. Enhances code quality with more thorough and accurate
   testing.

The Results

After comparing Parasoft’s solution to competitors, PSCU found that Virtualize offered a scalable, cost-effective, and supported option that worked best for their goals. The PSCU development team has seen great improvements in code coverage and code quality while also seeing reduced development and test execution times in the CI/CD pipeline.

With an ambitious goal of .5 KLOCs, PSCU has already improved code coverage in the short time since they implemented service virtualization from the previous baseline of 30% to the new baseline of 85%, which exceeds the industry average of 80% code coverage.

Virtual assets give the team control over creating responses for the third-party data enabling them to increase code coverage. They established a gate of 85%. If the team doesn’t meet that gate, then the build automatically fails. With the gate in place and the ability to use virtual assets, they’ve been able to achieve higher levels of code coverage.

Service virtualization also enhances the team’s ability to precondition data and helps to eliminate inconsistent backend latency—two traits especially important to Shet and his team at PSCU. With virtual assets in place, the team isn’t dependent on data from third-party providers.

“With Parasoft Virtualize, the wait time for virtual assets and a testing environment is zero minutes! We can go to production confident with the virtual assets and a proper test environment without waiting for a third party to make the environment available, which took at least two months. This Parasoft solution could have significantly reduced our previous project timeline down to one or two months.”

—Hirakant Shet, Manager of Integration Services at PSCU