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Whitepaper
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Service virtualization simulates dependent services beyond your control, enabling reliable test automation through stable, predictable test environments. Multiple approaches and tools exist in the market.
What should you look for to maximize ROI?
This guide identifies key features and capabilities needed for successful enterprise deployment and adoption of service virtualization.
Service virtualization solutions fall into two categories.
Organizations need both lightweight and enterprise capabilities—the best approach is evaluating required features to ensure your tooling choice has necessary capabilities for current and future needs.
Free or open-source tools (Traffic Parrot, Mockito) help beginners quickly learn service virtualization benefits in an ad hoc way. These solutions are typically brought in by individual development teams for specific projects.
Downsides: They lack the breadth and ease of use required for organizational adoption. While free initially, they become expensive as you invest in maintenance and customization.
Vendor-supported tools designed for power users who need daily access to comprehensive virtual services. These solutions integrate tightly into build pipelines and handle large traffic volumes while maintaining performance.
When organizations implement virtualization as part of CI and DevOps pipelines, enterprise solutions integrate through native plugins. Obviously, these solutions aren’t free, so organizations need to make informed decisions.
To dynamically deploy virtual services as a function of code check-in, your service virtualization solution should be able to integrate into your existing CI process. This will allow you to surround your application with virtual environments and execute your integrated test scenarios as early as possible, defining virtual service behavior such as specific data sources and performance profiles as a part of your CI configuration. This will allow you to deploy the right virtual services, the right way, automatically, and will greatly stabilize your CI pipeline.
Many CI pipelines take advantage of build systems such as Jenkins, Microsoft’s Azure DevOps, Atlassian’s Bamboo, JetBrain’s TeamCity, and many more. To optimize workflows, your service virtualization solution should have native plugins into these build systems so that you can accomplish your automation tasks that involve virtualization as a build step in your pipeline. This will not only make environment management a much easier task but will help build virtualization in as a part of your DevOps process.
If your service virtualization solution can execute via command line invocation, you will be able to dynamically start and stop your virtual servers as needed when running your test cases. Your command line interface should be dynamic as well, so you can swap configuration details on the fly.
Open APIs that enable you to programmatically generate, configure, and deploy virtual services, will allow you to set up a client/server configuration for your DevOps pipeline and your service virtualization platform. A series of open APIs will provide you with the ability to set up a scalable infrastructure nd reduce overall licensing costs by programmatically making calls to the virtualization server from multiple areas of your organization as needed to configure the right virtual services on demand.
If your service virtualization solution can be deployed either on premise or into a cloud environment such as Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure, you will be able to swap out the underlying hardware with ease. Containerization is a big component of reference architectures as well, so look for service virtualization that gives you the ability to deploy the technology via Docker.
Choosing the right service virtualization solution for your organization can be a huge undertaking. Moving away from industry buzz and focusing on critical features and capabilities that your organization will need is the best way to identify the right solution. To get a solution that has all these capabilities and more, discover Parasoft Virtualize.
When testing is at a standstill because systems are difficult to access, scale, or configure, you can rapidly create virtual test environments with Parasoft Virtualize. Use Virtualize to create, deploy, and manage simulated dev/test environments and minimize constraints that ordinarily arise from inadequate test data.
Unlike any other service virtualization solution, Virtualize can create realistic simulations by monitoring existing behavior, enabling users with limited expertise to quickly create reliable test environments.
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