Vendors usually like to tell you how critical it is that you purchase and use their technologies, but not much attention is given to the types of people and businesses for whom the technology is not a good fit. This short list aims to remedy that where service virtualization is concerned.
Here?s how you can tell that you probably don?t need virtual services.
Your Business is Simple.
Let's face it: Life and business are way simpler than people think. Your business is tiny, and you like it that way. You have no legacy applications to integrate or upgrade, no databases, no NoSQL, no JMS or MQ, no RESTful services, and no mainframe. You don't employ or contract any software developers. In fact, you just make and sell small handicrafts on someone else's website.
What's a Defect?
You don't have those. Your customers and stakeholders love your product, giving it consistent 5-star ratings, and your sales are growing. You can maintain this situation indefinitely.
You're Unimaginably Profitable.
Inefficiencies don't matter to you because you can spend billions without a care. "Just throw money at it" is your motto. Also, third-party services are the best! They can charge you whatever they want because they are so wonderfully reliable and accountable to your needs.
Every Developer is Linus Torvalds on Steroids.
If there were a list of world's best software engineers, every member of your team would be on it. They are all world-renowned, heavily-published, and widely-read. They write perfect code on their first try, and they never need to test it. They're so good that you skip prototypes and go straight to production-ready systems overnight. Also, fantastic new developers spontaneously appear at your doorstep, so nobody ever needs any training.
You Have No Competition.
It's good to be the only game in town, and there's no chance of one of those "ankle-biters" sprouting up to steal your customers away by delivering better, faster, cheaper products. In fact, you're going to raise your prices just because you can.
You Deliver New Features Every Day.
You are decades ahead of the curve on automation. Your Agile sprints are measured in hours, not weeks. Your Continuous Delivery process will go down in history as one of the great wonders of the world. No team is ever waiting for another team or module to get done; you have a perfectly balanced Just-In-Time development process.
Nothing Ever Changes.
Everyone knows that software is as stable and unchanging as bedrock. Disruption happens in other industries, not yours. It's good to be in an industry where you never need to plan for the future.
Security is Overrated.
You don't have anything of value to yourself, your customers, or potential hackers. It's perfectly fine to use real systems, real credit card numbers, and real logins/passwords in your test environment. You have no concerns related to your brand or your personal reputation. Besides, your insurance covers the losses from intellectual property theft and class action lawsuits, right?
Performance is Also Overrated.
In particular, your performance testing environment is ideally suited to immediately identify bottlenecks without further testing and investigation on a functional or component level. There's no need to test services independently of their dependencies because that's not any faster than trial-and-error fixes followed by full retesting of the whole system. Plus, it's so easy to reset your performance environment with new data that you already run these tests at least daily.
You Think Virtual Services Are the Same as Stubbing and Mocking.
You're convinced that "virtual services" is just a fancy marketing label slapped onto older and simpler technology. You are certain that "intelligence and adaptability" require manual human intervention, and you accept that these things take days or weeks, not minutes or hours, to accomplish. Your developers have so much free time that their manual efforts to create and customize stubs and mocks have zero impact on your revenue-generating application development.
On the off chance that none of the above applies to you, the beginning of a new year is a great time to take on a new project that could boost your career. Despite the fact that service virtualization ? a technology that enables you to simulate web APIs and behavior of your in-house and third-party services ? is over 10 years old, plenty of companies are only now beginning to implement it in their development process.
If your testing efforts are often delayed due to lack of access to environments, if it seems like you?re always making/hearing excuses for why you can?t test right now, or if your agility is hampered by an inability to quickly prototype new interfaces, then service virtualization just might be one critical missing piece of your development puzzle.
For more information, visit https://www.ca.com/us/products/ca-service-virtualization.html. To get started with the basics, install the free CA Service Virtualization Community Edition, found here: https://www.ca.com/us/trials/ca-service-virtualization-community-edition.html.
