From wheels to telescopes to microscopes, what man has got a good hold on is not just a form of technology but a supporting limb that amplifies ideas and work explosively. It does not matter whether it helps to see something faster, closer or in more detail- as long as it helps — humans always find themselves nimble-footed and with hotter biceps when the right button is handy.
Now peek into the Gartner Research ‘Recommendations for API Testing, Service Virtualization, and Continuous Testing in Agile Environments’. In exercising meaningful tests, a huge spoiler is lack of access to a complete test environment. When one is struggling around umpteen dependent systems that the Application Under Test (AUT) interacts with, muddled further with the knobbly nature of today’s applications, getting to and using a complete test environment, often, becomes a pipe-dream.
It is here that we find Service Virtualization coming in as just the very button that empowers a testing hand. With strong and strategic emulation of the behaviour of specific components, it helps in ironing out the issue of environment-poverty.
It jumpstarts regular execution of initial automated-test-suite and adds a supersonic force to CI (Continuous Integration) by shaving off dependencies. The goal of a good Service Virtualisation approach is making dependent systems available with the appropriate configuration and at the same time sliding in the requisite functionality and test data without any time barriers or latencies.
If we rewind to Forrester analyst’s Diego Lo Guidice keynote at a Continuous Delivery (CD) Conference, we gather that success of CD and Agile manual testing has to be shrunk from 60–80 percent of the testing effort down to 5–20 percent. Environment complexity makes Continuous Testing more tangled and weighed down by dependencies. Simulation of resources and environment-elements such as a mainframe, a testing tool or a third-party service allows actual, uninterrupted, fluid continuity, integration and consistency in testing.
Let us take a good look under the hood now.
Common Challenges Faced
Scaling in number of connected sensors
A good Service Virtualisation solution can achieve real-time scalability without ruining the connectedness of sensors that line the space up. The developers and testing teams and phases do not get drifted off or disoriented in fragmentation or scale barriers. It is important that Service Virtualization nails these gaps with a good eye on the big picture and continuity-stream.
Difficulty in testing multiple configurations
Real and fail-proof testing reckons every possible scenario and covers all devices, platforms and configurations that can play a major or minor role in making an application work on the roads. This heterogeneity is addressed strongly and durably by deploying a well-wedged Service Virtualisation solution. Testing becomes a fast-track circuit that it is, ideally, supposed to be.
Troubles in delivering the right performance in a live environment
A live environment is full of expected, unexpected, tangible, intangible elements and forces. More so when testing is being relied upon to pass the verdict on an application where stakes can change anytime and at any degree of domino-effect. This makes Service Virtualization compelling enough to ensure that performance is not just tested against paper-boxes but in the face of real, live, make-it-or-break-it environments. Service Virtualisation, leveraged well, can take those wrinkles and scepticism off.
Benefits
This is not just an answer that tackles availability of resources but also their costs, intersections, redundancies and environment-equations.
It also adds to the overall pizza of virtualisation injected in adjacent slices such as hardware (VPS) or operating system (VMware and similar solutions) or other assets turned virtual.
It also touches upon areas such as database parts, message protocols, mainframe interaction etc.
With this approach, one can drill out:
- Wiping out delays that arise from availability.
- Test cycle smooth-runs.
- Positive and comprehensive test coverage.
- Continuous-maintenance and access to test environments.
- Readiness for live environments.
- Support for ‘shift left’ testing.
- Exposure of defects at the right and early stage.
- Simplified test environment access.
- Removal or trimming of Set-up barriers.
- Resource-sharing across development teams.
- Reduced Operational Expenditures.
- Savings in configuration time.
- Speed-gains in test cycles.
- Wipe-offs of interface dependencies
- Reliable test-environments
Conclusion
Why scratch your heads and wallets with worries of consistent and robust availability of resources, environments, data, performance across test cycles, teams and runs? Why not slap on some simulation. It is amplification and confidence that works just as tremendously and durably as a wheel or a wing or a new button.
It pushes us closer to production-like environments without spilling over the needed resource, time and scale that those would demand. Consistency, cost, security, and privacy is what simulation technologies whip up while navigating the usual, on-ground constraints around dependent systems.
This is what brings testers, developers and organisations to the ultimate aim of thorough, deep, effective, flexible, swift, smooth, user-oriented, agile, and end-to-end tests.
It is about amplifying and accelerating — in one go. It is about adding elasticity. And eventually, adding confidence.
