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Resource constraints inherent in today’s heterogeneous enterprise environments can impede a QA/development team’s ability to construct test suites. This ultimately handicaps the team’s ability to deliver and evolve secure, reliable, and compliant applications on time and on budget. As applications continue to grow increasingly complex and certainly more distributed, this problem compounds significantly.
Efforts to ensure the quality of today’s heterogeneous applications are hindered not only by system availability constraints innate to the applications’ distributed architectures, but also by human constraints associated with the way in which such systems are developed, tested, and evolved.
Today’s heterogeneous applications involve a number of components; for example, consider the following diagram of a common enterprise application architecture:
Efforts to test such applications are commonly delayed (and often cut short) because one or more component is incomplete, evolving, unstable, inaccessible, or otherwise unavailable for testing. Such difficulties stem from the following constraints:
In addition, the following human constraints compound the difficulty of performing thorough testing with the given time frame and resources:
Service virtualization is key to overcoming testing constraints that moat projects suffer from. By simulating services that are out of your control or unavailable, service virtualization enables users to access complete and realistic test environments, enabling teams to develop and test their applications earlier and more completely. By applying service virtualization in testing environments, organizations can reduce or eliminate the dependence on unavailable, unstable, or costly dependencies, such as 3rd party services, databases, mainframes, etc. Parasoft Virtualize provides intuitive service virtualization solution makes it easy for users to create, scale, and share virtual services.
Using virtual services means quicker recovery from change as fast (or faster) than their real counterparts. Testers can use automated workflows to easily update impacted virtual services and test data as necessary. Automated tools can also keep track of all these changes, with versioning by storing all relevant data as comparable files that are compatible with standard version control systems.
A key aspect of test automation and service virtualization is the creation and reuse of test assets for not only functional testing but for other critical testing such as security and performance testing. In addition, it’s possible to rapidly build virtual services on the fly, and inject them with business logic and test data to support local API development. Virtual services benefit from a file-based configuration, making them easy to share between development and QA for defect reproduction and support.