The business value of service virtualization in quality assurance

Better quality software. Shorter time to market. Cost savings. These are the three key business outcomes that service virtualization brings in a test organization. If these outcomes are of no interest to you, you can skip this blog. But do read on if you want to reap these rewards by taking your quality assurance to the next level.

Your application is not an island

Software development is a challenging environment. As organizations are digitizing their business processes, software becomes crucial in supporting business flows and keeping customers (and employees!) happy. Clunky or malfunctioning software will ruin customer experience, hence the growing interest in quality assurance. However, when you start to test software, you may encounter a number of hurdles:

-?????????Your software integrates with other internal applications. In the traditional development lifecycle, these integrations will only be tested in the acceptance phase. If you only find errors at that stage, you have to go back to development and start over, making you waste valuable time.

-?????????Your software may need to process data from third-party applications. Same problem in this case: you will only get a hold of these data in the acceptance phase, and perhaps only when you put the system into production. In some cases, you may not have access to these third parties to influence the test data. Again, you will lose valuable time.

-?????????If you do manage to integrate all applications and all third-party data into the development phase, the cost will be high, as you already need to provide the same infrastructure in the development stage as you would need in a production environment.

-?????????You may need to integrate with third-party services that charge access or transaction fees. If you have to pay these fees already during development or testing, it will cost you a bundle.

Shift left and save time

Service virtualization clears these hurdles for you:

-?????????Service virtualization will simulate the dependencies with other systems and you can continue testing as if all these other applications were up and running.

-?????????Applications send messages to other applications. If these applications are not live or not yet functioning, service virtualization will ensure that you do get a message back. This enables you to continue testing interfaces much earlier in the development cycle.

-?????????Service virtualization acts as a ‘man-in-the-middle’: rather than sending messages to other applications, your application will send the messages to the service virtualization, which will answer these messages.

-?????????If any integration errors are detected, this happens in the early stages of your development lifecycle, not in the acceptance stage or (God forbid!) in production. In other words, service virtualization allows you to shift left.

The advantages of service virtualization are clear: by identifying errors at the integration level earlier in the process, the development lifecycle can be shortened considerably, leading to faster time to market and lower development costs. You expose defects when they are fastest, easiest and cheapest to fix. At the same time, you mitigate the risk of putting systems into production that are not yet ready for prime time.

Service virtualization always brings benefits, but especially so in complex environments with multiple dependencies. Just think of an SAP application that needs to interact with a host of other business applications. There is simply no way to go and test all these integrations when you are still in the development phase. Service virtualization will make it possible anyway.

Integrated and orchestrated

Orchestrated Service Virtualization (OSV) from Tricentis is tightly integrated with other Tricentis products, such as Tosca. Using the same interfaces and look and feel, makes using OSV easy for test engineers. Just like other Tricentis solutions, OSV works scriptless and is easy to use and maintain. Tosca also helps you populate service virtualization tests with data that are appropriate for automated, continuous test execution. This means you don’t have to obtain and configure test data for a single test run – a process that can easily take weeks. What’s more, OSV can manage all interfaces across the entire business process (hence the ?Orchestrated’ in its name), and its test cases and test data are always kept in sync.

A couple of years ago, Bloor reviewed Tricentis OSV. The report clearly stated the advantages: “With Tosca and OSV, Clearstream – part of the Deutsche B?rse Group – was 1 year ahead of its internal project schedule.”

So if you want to make a saving while delivering better quality software faster to the market, just let me know.