Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

It allows you to have a bunch of manual testers who can easily use the tool set, as well as hardcore devs or SDETs who know how to code. They can also use the tool set.

And, on the virtualization side, it really kind of helps you save money, because you can unblock yourself. If something's not ready, you can go and virtualize that, unblock your automation. We actually found in the last project that we should have used more virtualization, because our environment wasn't really stable. And so, we should have virtualized the things that we were automating so that we could demonstrate the automation wasn't the problem. That was always a question mark for people, and so that's a takeaway that I'll do again on the next project.

A couple of the most valuable features, to me, are the fact that you can have a lot of different people with different technologies use the tool, without any programming experience at all, all the way up to people who can program. And then, the more technical that you are, the more programming you have, the more you're able to customize the tool. Basically customize it to do what you want it to do. That's one thing. 

The other thing is, it's got probably the greatest amount of features, in terms of different technologies that you can automate and virtualize, out of any of the solutions out there. So, it really can accomplish any task that you want to do with it.

I really want to see more of the "express" kind of model, where you get a little bit for free. I'd love to be able to see you be able to edit and author tests without having to be connected to a licensed server. And then, if you want to go and execute tests, then you go and connect to the server. That's a request I've been making, and I'd like to see that. I think it's in line with the open source model, and I think it would unblock people to be able to do a lot more work from home or from remote places, where they can't really connect to the server.

It's very stable. It's very robust. 

I have noticed that sometimes memory consumption can get high if you use the tool repeatedly. But, it's pretty manageable. It's come a long way. I've used it for multiple versions, and I'm on version 10 now, and I'm very happy with the stability. 

It's very scalable. The server, we've actually scaled it up quite a bit. One of the projects I was on, we were running thousands of tests, and the server wasn't really set up to handle that. So, we increased the amount of coordinators, and RAM, and processing power. And, just by making those small changes, we were easily able to scale to, like, thousands and thousands of tests. I'm happy with the scalability.

I wasn't using any previous solution. When I came to T-Mobile, SV was a fairly new tool at T-Mobile. So, we didn't have any other previous solution. We used this one, and none of the other solutions that have been out there have been better, so we've kept using it. Didn't need to switch, and we have been continuing to invest in it, because it's been meeting and exceeding our needs.

I give it between an eight and a nine out of 10. I don't ever really give 10s, because I always think that things can be improved, so it's a great product.

It is throughout the STLC, so we actually have rights from the PoC or idealization from testing, development, and even production support where someone would like to use it for certification, or a sandbox perspective.

It is easy to use, has a faster time to market, and provides flexibility. 

On our customer side, we have actually done a lot with this particular tool. It has helped a lot of teams to accelerate their testing and development, and saved a lot of money on the infrastructure side, setting up the sandbox side, etc.

• Flexibility
• Ease of use
• How much easier or faster we can actually make something happen.

1. The enterprise catalog. Usually what happens is once you have a set of virtual services, then you go to an enterprise. So, people would like to see what is already virtualized and how can they take advantage of it. Right now, it is actually not part of the product, therefore we created something, a custom solution, for it at this point of time. These are two separate things. Sometimes, we have to put some effort into it. If it could be part of the product itself, a service catalog where a user could actually come and see what is already virtualized, how they could actually utilize it, and the value it adds.
2. The access control to the new portal. There is a new portal available and we are making it as a self-service thing. Whoever wants to create their own virtual service so they can actually go there and create the virtual service. The problem we have right now is how do we restrict access to each of those virtual services or the projects. So, that is not implemented in the product yet.
3. Cloud readiness. I know it is available in AWS, but we would like to see how we can actually make it more cloud-friendly.

It is much better now with the newer version. We have had issues when they moved it to a newer platform of a base platform a couple of releases back. So, we had issues in the past, but I would say of the latest version, 10.1, that we are using, it is in a much better position. But there are still areas to improve and we are actually working with CA to give feedback, and they are continuously trying to improve the product.

It is scalable. We actually use it for both functional and performance purposes. In the functional area, it actually works pretty well. In the performance area, we do not know where the limit is at this point of time. So far, it has actually worked well and we are able to bring it to multiple environments. Therefore, I would say it is pretty scalable at this point of time.

They are very prompt and very easy to work with. I have been working on this product for the last six or seven years, so I know most of the support team. It is pretty easy to work with, explain things to them, and get the right support. Also, I am able to get additional details about new feature releases, so it is actually pretty good.

The initial setup was straightforward. We did have some problems with the one of the upgrades. CA actually releases a new version every year, so we try to catch up with it. We have had issues with the prior to last upgrade. This one was okay, the latest one.

We actually did PoCs with other tools, then came up with the pros and cons. This was the product that checked the most boxes.

It does what it promises. I would definitely recommend to take a look at this solution, because of the ease of it.

I use VSI, VSM, and SOA testing. I hardly use performance testing and automated GUI testing.

The tool is currently mostly focused on SOA-related and performance testing. Its GUI automation testing is not that powerful compared to other tools, such as HPE UFT, and Selenium, in terms of, particularly, object recognition, smart identification, results repository, frameworks driven, integration with test management repositories, and ETL testing.

Today, customers look for one consolidated vendor to manage licenses and best usage under TEM (Test Environment Management) services.

The following areas of the product have room for improvement: automated GUI testing, performance testing of various HTML5 applications and its recording capabilities. There are SAP, Siebel, Oracle Apps, Citrix, Remote Desktop and RTE applications that require a multi-faceted approach for sniffing the requests and preparing the scripts.

Additionally, it does not have a robust test management repository. This impacts connecting the various phases of testing life cycle.

We have stability issues when creating stubs for performance testing. It provides the internal native web server where the VSIs are hosted/deployed, which are not scalable at higher load. They should more flexible and able to use multiple application servers. Sometimes, the VSIs stop responding too.

There is a scalability issue regarding licenses. The Developer Edition should be free and only charge for the hosting licenses. There are charges even for transactions and hits also, which makes it difficult to track usage and optimization.

While basic questions are answered, it becomes difficult with tricky questions such as, is the request payload non-plain text or Java de-serialized objects, and about customizing them. When we approach support, they redirect us to professional services. We need more helpful support here.

We used SOAPUI Pro for when web services and JMS queues had to be mocked. We shifted to CA for other protocols. But customers are looking at the return on the investment they made. Convincing them becomes a challenge.

Initial setup was OK.

Licensing definitely needs more flexible models. Too many complicated parameters also makes it difficult for us to explain them to our customers. Pricing definitely is too high. Not sure if CA is aware of SOAPUI Mock Services – a free alternative. And, for Pro, it is only $120 per year. If a customer has only a Web Services context, CA should explain how to bring up that story.

We have evaluated several products more than once, starting with SOAPUI Pro, IBM RTVS (earlier Green Hat), and Parasoft Virtualize.

It provides us a high level of integration with all of our solutions, to the extent that we can set up modules with Service Virtualization functionality at the same time. We will do more with it once we get more into it. So far, we have been using it mainly for services.

It's allows us to work more globally across all our teams. Since the tool integrates with our services, we can do more.

I spoke to them at a recent conference and I think they're going to be looking at doing some more JUnit integration to be able to convert JUnit into their solutions. We're still using an older version so, hopefully upgrading to a newer version will enhance some of the features that are already out there that we don't have.

Stability is getting better. When we first started with it, there were some bugs. We had some issues between our environment and the tool.

It seems to be that we'll be able to scale it, as we get more into this tool and other CA tools. It seems like we're able to build one top of the other.

We used technical support quite a bit for different issues that popped up when we first started using the tool or tried to use new features. We’ve received great service. We’ve been working with some senior engineers and they've been taking our input. Hopefully, we'll be able to start working with them a little bit more when they do their baselines for new features.

We were using SoapUI and we were looking for a higher level of integration.

Initial setup was both straightforward and complex. We had some configuration issues, such as conflicts with our firewall. They helped with what they were able to help with. For some of the issues, we needed our security desk and network teams to open up ports and other things like that.

We brought on some new senior management directors and looked at different tools. We evaluated a number of different API testing tools. I don't know them all. Choosing CA was a management decision. I think my new manager had used or seen the tool in the past.

When looking for a vendor, functionality and the user experience are the most important criteria. It has to be easy to use or people aren't going to use it.

Be patient and understanding will come. It's new functionality and all tools work a little bit different.

The most valuable feature, and really SV's main feature, is the versatility of available protocols that cover a very large number of cases.

The product has not been used often by my company but rather by one of our customers. The customer has large dimensions and the product has been used both to compensate for the lack of components (one paid for the use or were not developed) and for performance tests. Its introduction, if maintained over time, should guarantee a huge time saver.

I wish the product had a built-in help function.

We've been using this solution since March of 2014, so about a year-and-a-half.

We did not encounter any major problems with deployment.

We did not encounter any major problems with stability.

We did not encounter any major problems with scaling it.

Customer service in Italian is not very useful. I found the forums on the support site of CA to be much more useful.

The forums provide us better technical support that CA's support here in Italy.

I had never used a solution for service virtualization prior to this. We chose this solution because of our partnership with CA.

The server-side configuration and the start of activities at our customer required the intervention of expert staff of CA because we did not have the necessary experience. I am of the opinion that it is better to follow the advice of experts where things are not specified in a simple manual.

It was done through a vendor team.

I have not edited the offer made to our customer. Being a major customer, I know that CA has created a type of license tailored to their business.

Read the manuals and practice a lot.

This helps my team in virtualizing responses so we are not dependent on the systems when they are down. It also helps in mocking up a new functionality and virtualizing it which may not be yet dev-delivered. We also tried to automate services using LISA, but faced numerous challenges.

We don’t see enough value in virtualizing the services just because it requires a huge amount of maintenance and there is not much support available online. I’d like to see a more simple approach to virtualizing the services.

We've used it for two years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

We've had no issues scaling it.

In my experience, I'd say that technical support is not so good.

We have not used other solutions other than using UFT for automation.

The initial setup was a little complex.

CA LISA was initially brought onsite for training, but after that all development was done onsite.

If you are using this for automation of web services, we found it hard to have a customized solution.

We use it to have a highly-available development process because we develop our front end and middleware in tandem with our services teams. When their stuff goes down we don’t want them to cause us a delay on deliverables to the client.

Having a virtual service to rely on, we’re able to continue development even when one of their services fails. They provide built-in data handlers for a variety of different protocols. The REST data protocol auto-parses everything, so you can do analytics. It can flex and provide different responses depending on the request, and is easily measurable and repeatable.

We have issues where one of our dev services goes down, but we still have commitments we have to keep. We’re able to continue development and push for service for our clients even when other aspects fail, instead of causing delays.

Improved Mac support would be an improvement. Also, when things fail, I’d like to see meaningful error messages. A more stable client-side application would be a big thing – their server side application is pretty solid.

It’s pretty good. It’s an Eclipse IDE app, so it’s a little old, and their Mac support isn’t as strong as it could be, but otherwise it’s pretty solid. Once you deploy the virtual services everything just kind of works.

We haven’t really tested it at scale. All of our work has been at the single-team level.

I've just used their community support.

We were the pilot team for the solution. It was fairly straightforward; install a package on a server, start up some services, and go.

It’s provided value. We’ve been able to continue development even when we wouldn’t previously have been able to continue. There’s been a learning curve, some hiccups, and a challenge to train new people on the solution. There is some barrier to entry.

It's allowed us to be able to set up virtualization web services quickly and to test unhappy path scenarios. It’s easy to use in setting up virtualization and testing edge-case scenarios.

The time savings it's provided us are huge. We've been able to have a reduction in headcount as well because it requires less staff to manage it. We're simply able to operate more efficiently from a time and human resources perspective.

From a technical use perspective, the improvement in our organization comes from being able to test situations before they arise in production.

I would really like more relevant online documentation. There’s not really enough of it. They should also provide some case studies so that I can see what others have done and how their experiences might help me in my situations.

I'd have no issues with deployment.

I haven’t had any issues as it seems stable.

I haven’t had any issues scaling, so it seems it works well as we grow.

I've never had to use technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup. I have also not been involved the setup of any new releases.

It loses points in documentation. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff out there, but the out-of-the-box documentation is lacking.