Service Virtualization Provides the Next Generation of Test Environment Management

Our interconnected world depends upon software that is becoming increasingly complex to develop and test. With multiple dependent systems, a complete and realistic test environment is nearly impossible to stage. Developers, QA testers, and performance engineers face systems that are impractical or too complex for test labs, including mainframes and large ERPs.

Service Virtualization delivers a simulated test environment that allows you to test earlier, faster and more completely.

Blue Turtle Technologies (Blue Turtle) through its partnership with Parasoft provides a solution, Parasoft Virtualize, that addresses the requirements often seen in today’s complex environments where interdependent systems wreak havoc on parallel development and functional/performance testing efforts—significantly impacting productivity, quality, and project timelines. As systems become more complex and interdependent, development and quality efforts are further complicated by constraints that limit developer and tester access to realistic test environments. These constraints often include:

• Missing/unstable components
• Evolving development environments
• Inaccessible 3rd party/partner systems and services
• Systems that are too complex for test labs (mainframes or large ERPs)
• Internal and external resources with multiple “owners”

“Development environments need to be tested and this is increasing exponentially. With multiple new interfaces and ways for people to access core technology, systems and architectures have grown broader, larger, and more distributed—with multiple endpoints and access points. Testing in this environment has become very difficult and time consuming”, comments Tommy Erlank, Enterprise Application Management, Blue Turtle.

Service Virtualization provides developers and testers the freedom to exercise their applications in incomplete, constantly evolving, and/or difficult-to-access environments. Rather than virtualizing entire applications and/or databases, Service Virtualization (also known as “Application-Behavior Virtualization”) focuses on virtualizing only the specific behavior that is exercised as developers and testers execute their core use cases. For example, instead of trying to virtualize the complete dependent component—the entire database, the entire third-party application, and so forth—you virtualize only the specific behavior that developers and testers actually need to exercise as they work on their particular applications, components, or scenarios.

This type of virtualization is entirely complementary to traditional virtualization—radically reducing the configuration time, hardware overhead, and data management efforts involved in standing up and managing a realistic and sustainable development/testing environment. By applying Service Virtualization in this manner, you can remove the dependency on the actual live system/architecture while maintaining access to the dependent behavior. This ultra-focused approach significantly reduces the time and cost involved in managing multiple environments—as well as complex test data management.

Organisations have successfully applied Service Virtualization to address development/testing environment management challenges in three common contexts:

• Performance/capacity-constrained environment
• Complex, difficult-to-access systems (mainframes, large ERPs, 3rd party systems)
• Parallel development (Agile or other iterative processes)

In conclusion, with Service Virtualization, teams reduce the complexity and the costs of managing multiple environments while providing ubiquitous access for development and test. Service Virtualization helps you:

• Reduce infrastructure costs
• Improve provisioning/maintenance of test environments
• Increase test coverage
• Reduce defects
• Improve predictability/control of software cycle times
• Increase development productivity
• Reduce 3rd party access fees

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