Continuous Testing Finds a New Facilitator – Service Virtualization

 

In today’s competitive digital space, software development teams are under pressure to deliver timely and innovative applications that can help organisations to be a step ahead of others. This hurried approach by app developers often misses out on one crucial aspect – ensuring quality. This is due to the fact that quality testing at all stages of app development / system integration requires a real test environment, which more often than not is either cost prohibitive, difficult to configure or simply not available. The dependencies can provide erroneous responses due to the following reasons:

•      Not fully developed to generate a response
•     Controlled by a third party
•      Present at remote locations thus not possible to bring them on site
•    Available partially or at inconvenient times
•   Difficult to leverage as required by many teams, simultaneously
•   Require manual intervention at their ends to generate responses

To get over the problem of dependencies giving erroneous or no responses, development teams or testers make use of the Service Virtualization method.

Service Virtualization: This method provides access to heterogeneous components or dependencies that are part of an application and gets responses thereupon by replicating them as virtual assets. The applications that are dependent on such components can either be API driven or cloud based. In other words, Service Virtualization Strategy can do away with the presence of actual components, wherein the actual components can be in the form of databases, mainframes, ERPs, web services etc. Service Virtualization practices involve generation of responses from virtual assets upon receipt of service requests. For example:

a) If the virtual asset is a database, the service request could be in the form of a SQL query and the response could be in the form of a specified data row.

b) If the virtual asset is a web service, the service request could be in the form of a XML statement and the resultant response could be in the form of another XML statement.

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