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Since service virtualization tools become part of your core architecture, selecting the vendor and product that’s the best fit for your organization’s process and culture is crucial to your long-term success and return on investment.
The vendor that’s most prominent in the marketplace may or may not deliver the best results in your environment, but how can you determine this before you’ve already committed considerable resources to the initiative?
As you begin your service virtualization tool comparison, be sure to ask each service virtualization tool vendor a broad array of questions that will help you gain a clear understanding of their approach to service virtualization—and how that will impact your organization’s productivity, costs, and success if you ultimately commit to working with this vendor.
With diligent probing, you’ll be able to zero in on important evaluation criteria related to:
Want some guidance on what questions to ask? Here are a few questions to get you started:
One of the most critical aspects of service virtualization solutions is the hidden costs associated with professional services from the vendor. In many cases, the ratio of professional service to technology costs can be quite high and should be considered as part of the total cost of ownership. Although professional services might be required to jump-start your process, in the long run, the technology’s architecture, flexibility, and suitability to your evolving needs will dictate costs—whether direct OpEx associated with your staff, or indirect OpEx associated with a system integrator.
Before you begin examining service virtualization tool vendors, we strongly recommend that you ask yourself some questions about your implementation strategy. Once you know what plan of action makes sense for your needs, you’re in a much better position to determine if a particular vendor will help you get there.
Service virtualization plays a key role in API testing, so when considering an API test strategy, an important step is to evaluate how virtual services are being consumed within the team and how it suits both developers and testers. Developers may adopt virtualization initially as they grow out the implementation then later to be adopted by testers. At this point it becomes critical to consider the possible knowledge gap between the test and development teams since APIs might be new territory for testers.
Parasoft’s How to Adopt & Scale Service Virtualization paper outlines a number of key considerations, ranging from general decision criteria (your risk tolerance, access to dependent systems, etc.), to the expected implementation focus (environment-based, project-based, demand-based, or hybrid), to the anticipated team structure (distributed, center of excellence, or hybrid). You can also visit our service virtualization tutorial to learn more about the technology.
Parasoft’s industry-leading automated software testing tools support the entire software development process, from when the developer writes the first line of code all the way through unit and functional testing, to performance and security testing, leveraging simulated test environments along the way.