Our digital world is becoming more and more networked. At the latest since the home washing machine can be conveniently controlled from the workplace and real-time tracking of the Amazon package is possible, we have arrived in the age of the “IOT – Internet of things”. As a result, quality assurance is becoming increasingly important. Therefore, a high-performance test environment and a well-founded test execution are existential.
The big challenge here is that both the developers and the testers cannot always access the necessary surrounding systems or test environments. The consequences are idle times, development and test costs as well as time delays.
This is where the concept of service virtualization comes into play. This solution can efficiently meet the requirements of an increasingly networked world. Virtualization is increasingly becoming the dominant topic in IT. It is regarded as a decisive pioneer in ensuring an efficient IT infrastructure for companies.
Definition: Service Virtualization
Service virtualization is a method for simulating and testing interfaces in a heterogeneous IT landscape. The term “service” describes the service provided in the form of information or data, for example. Web services are an example of services.
“Virtualization” refers to the replication of an object such as software and hardware components or memory by a similar object of the same type with the help of a software layer. Virtualization is the abstraction of physical IT resources. This allows services to be simulated, i.e. “faked”. Tests can be executed and continued even if no environments or surrounding systems are available.
Service virtualization is intended to enable developers and testers to access unavailable services using virtualized images of real services. These virtualized images are called “stubs”. Tests can thus be integrated at an early stage in the development process. This enables early detection of errors and contributes significantly to ensuring the highest software quality. The behavior in the system to be tested can also be forced by having control over the services.
Use Case: Service Virtualization
The term “service virtualization” is not yet known in many development departments. For this reason, the following section shows a scenario from everyday life where the significance of the concept becomes clear:
“As a spectator (in this case the software tester) of a rock concert (real service/interface) I would like to enjoy it again and again. For this I buy a Blu-ray disc (Record Data) to play the concert in my test environment again and again (virtually) (Replay), even in phases when the development environment cannot be reached (Timeout)”.
Challenges in everyday testing
Often the developers and/or testers do not always have access to the necessary surrounding systems or test environments. The reasons can be different:
The consequence of this is that idle times can occur. This also increases the development and test costs, as well as the time pressure towards the end of the release. Time pressure traditionally creates a high risk because end-to-end tests are carried out late and therefore not thoroughly. In addition, the necessary quality of the application is then also lacking.
As a rule, mock objects (program parts that are used to perform module tests as placeholders for real objects) are then developed as emergency solutions, which are usually expensive and require programming knowledge.
This is where service virtualization comes in.
