Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

We use it for service virtualization. It is performing well. 

Unit testing or early life testing did not have to be stopped or delayed because those services were not available. So, they can continue testing using this capability, whether those services are available or not.

It performs as advertised. We had a number of back-end services that were not available during testing times. What this had allowed us to do is get our early life testing done while those services are not available. 

We had to implement an external service catalog. We put it in ServiceNow. I would like to see an integrated service catalog. 

What we have done is put redundant systems in, so it is stable. We are on-premise, so we are not using the cloud version of Service Virtualization. 

It is as available as we can make it in our E2 environments.

It does scale up.

We had some on-premise support when we first implemented it, and they were excellent. We had some training for the product when we first implemented and that was excellent. We could not have been as successful, I don't believe without it either, because we had very complex environments early on in our DevOps journey. This was the first thing we were trying to automate back in 2011, so if we had it to do over again, we probably would not have done Service Virtualization first. However, with the implementation help and the training, we ultimately were successful.

We bought Service Virtualization because we are in a DevOps journey. If you are in need of services that are not available, you need to have a solution. 

I was the product manager that rolled it out to our enterprise. It was very complex.

CA was learning the product at the same time we were learning the product. CA had just bought the product from ITKO LISA (or acquired ITKO LISA). At the time, it did not have enterprise characteristics, since then CA has been able to bring to a large company as far as management capability, security, and things of that nature. When we were implementing it, it did not have that, but it does now. 

Upgrades are straightforward from a CA perspective. They are complex from our company perspective, and that is mostly self-inflicted. 

We did do a bake-off. We looked at three tools and CA was the best. Therefore, CA/ITKO was the choice.

You have to go check this tool out.

The innovation is amazing. CA has continued to add to services that it supports, the transports that it supports, and has built all of the enterprise capabilities into the product as well.

Most important criteria when a selecting a vendor: service and support. Pricing is right up there, too.

The virtualization options in the product: We can now virtualize entire backend systems or chains. That makes test and acceptance environments much more readily available, which offers more testing possibilities that results in better quality.

Our supply chain applications became available for more than 70% of the time compared to 25% before we started using LISA.

I would like to see better GUI testing possibilities.

It only supports web testing by working with Selenium: DevTest is positioned as a test automation tool. People want to use it as that, but then they find out it needs Selenium with all the downsides of that. We also have a couple of client applications they can’t be tested at all with DevTest/Selenium.

Beyond that, you need a lot of ports to be opened to enable working with it. That introduces a lot of problems trying to use it, especially the database connection from the client. A solution would be to add all of the functionality to the webclient.

The full client needs a database connection. That is a problem for us, because that is not allowed anymore.

I have used it for eight years. I started with LISA 5 just for virtualization, which is still the most powerful functionality. We have CA DevTest (LISA) version 8.4 in a semi-production environment. We are currently upgrading to version 9.5 to replace all of these.

You need a lot of servers in advanced datacenters because of security regulations. Opening a lot of ports from a lot of IP addresses to one server is not allowed. Multiple VSEs is the solution, but introduces more installation problems.

Sales and pre-sales support work very good. They are willing to help make more use of the products without wanting to sell more licenses (at least they don’t appear that way).

The support is pretty good. I don’t have direct contact but from our MSP, I get the impression that their questions are handled properly.

I did not previously use a different solution. At the time we started in 2009, this was the only solution.

With version 6, everything needed to be centralized. Now with 9.5, it can be decentralized. It is pretty complex, because it violates all kinds of security regulations at the network datacenter level.

We did this with Systemation, a local company with expert knowledge of LISA/DevTest.

My advice is to work together with the network/datacenter guys from the start.

We didn’t calculate the ROI. We started this to save test environment costs, but we ended up with more testing and better quality.

Pricing/licenses are very expensive, especially performance VSE, which is kind of foolish, especially if you use DevTest as a test driver too. You’ll pay for the vuser bundle and for the VSE.

Set up a central maintenance team, a CoE, but let the users use it themselves. That way, you’ll get more value out of the investment.

The product is easy to use and offers lots of functionalities. This product also supports the most protocols, compared to its competitors.

The most valuable feature for us is that it provides configuration settings to make connections to the DB and web services. Because it has pre-written code exposed through an UI, it makes it much easier to configure tests.

It's helped with our automation testing.

• UI testing could be improved.
• Also, it should have predefined plug-ins to integrate with other automation tools to help in tool-chain enablement.

We've used it for four years.

There were no issues with deployment.

Although the initial products were highly unstable, there is still room for improvement in versions 7.5/8/10.

It's scalable in terms of running a performance test because it supports limited virtual users.

5/10 - The worst thing is the training provided by iTKO/CA as it's very costly and not comprehensive.

7/10

We previously used SoapUI and this is much easier to configure.

The initial setup was straightforward.

ROI typically comes over a longer duration (both Service Virtualization and Release Automation), although its significant in terms of overall project cost when taking into account hardware, testing delays, and third-party dependencies.

It’s very expensive and to really come out with an ROI, it takes years.

We compared it to our existing solution at the time, SoapUI.

It’s a good product, but comes with a hefty cost. If there is a better licensing/cost negotiation, then it can work, otherwise it’s not a viable solution. Some of the in-house products can beat this with limited cost investment.

The DevTest Workstation (JMS steps) and CA Service Virtualization are the most valuable features.

By using the DevTest tool, we have successfully automated the testing in the Dev and QM spaces. We have also carried out virtualization of a few systems and intend to apply it on a larger scale in future.

There is need to improve the DevTest Workstation with UI-based testing features.

I have used this solution for one year.

It was easy to deploy, as proper documentation and additional support was provided by CA.

The product has been stable and patches have been provided on a regular basis.

The product has scaled to our needs.

The customer service was excellent.

The technical support was excellent.

Previously, we were using Java-based, homegrown tools for our automation processes.

Initial setup was complex, as we were new to the tool and to reach the current scenario, a learning curve in terms of the tool was required.

A PoC was carried out with a CA Service Virtualization technical resource and he met our expectations.

Applying automation using the DevTest Workstation for automation of middleware validation, has decreased manual effort by 40%.

We looked at the HPE UFT software.

You should try to do a PoC and then go through different use cases in order to understand where exactly this tool is applicable in your enterprise.

The keys feature of this product are:

• Workstation, where we can perform web service virtualization. That is primarily our focus, to enable the development and testing team.
• We are creating mocking and stopping for service virtualization.
• We are moving shift-left, meaning to carry out testing on the back-end which is not available. That's the main feature for this product.

My organization is looking at CA Agile, where this solution is available for the development and testing teams to enable their testing and provide a bug-free code.

We want to see more automation; an automated way of creating service virtualization without using the tool. That's the feature that we would like to see in the next release.

It is stable. We are using it in the Windows environment, so most of the time it's stable.

The product is scalable.

I would give the technical support a 50-50 rating, the reason being, for some of the custom solutions we have to depend on the tool. Thus, we have to enable and engage them for that implementation.

We didn’t have a previous solution for service virtualization. This is our first solution; we directly implemented it.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I would advise others who are looking for a similar solution to go for this product.

The main criteria while selecting a vendor is being a market leader who is number one in providing a solution for the problems/issues, which we are currently facing. That's the reason why we chose CA as they are market leaders for the product.

The product is good but there is some improvement required such as an automated way for creating those features which we are awaiting in the next release.

Quick setup of virtual services

Creation of virtual services by simply providing XML request/response pairs

We have used service virtualization to quickly spin up training environments. Recently, our dev teams have started using service virtualization to improve the times of the Continuous Integration Testing (CI). Using service virtualization has reduced the time for each CI cycle from 4 - 5 hours to under 1 hour. This allows many more CI cycles to be executed per day and per sprint allowing quicker time to finding bugs, as well as faster times to promotion of builds to the test environments.

VSEasy is a nice feature but it needs to have some catches added to it to keep from inadvertently overwriting someone else's virtual service.

3+ years

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

There was a memory leak in LISA 7.0.3 that would eventually require the rebooting of the memory to free back up the available memory. I have not yet been able to test DevTest 8.01 at that level to see if the memory leak still exists.

CA Support has been great for me!

Very good!

Service virtualization is the most valuable feature for us because there are fewer constraints through the SDLC cycle. It really helped us to remove bottlenecks and expedite the test time.

It helps with parallel testing. With all the development happening, the sub-systems are not available completely. By virtualizing those systems and services, we are able to deliver our product quickly.

The one main thing we want to see is more on the reporting side. That's the one thing that we're missing. We need more detailed reporting. In particular with some of the integration, we want to see more detailed reports so that we can drill down to more scenarios.

So far, with the last few projects, it is quite stable.

The scalability is good. We are still new with it, but in terms of scalability, it is working right as it's supposed to.

We have used technical support. There were really good. I would give them a 10/10 rating as they really helped us be our best.

We got introduced to the CA sales people via our other company. The vendor came in to introduce the product. After looking at it, we found that it fit to our needs. We were struggling with a lot of gaps in our SDLC and so we decided to do a PoC, and it worked out.

For us, the most important factor while selecting a vendor was the continued customer support. CA was able to give us the professional environment and continued support.

I was a part of the setup. However, I have the other group who carried out the process. It was quite straightforward because I was with them at the time.

We did not look at other vendors. CA happened to be the first one.

We are using this program, so I would try to use it the same way, This is not to advertise, but educate others. If you see any constraint in your testing or deployment, this solution can really help you in moving forward

I think the most valuable feature is the ability to quickly create simulations of APIs that you use to disconnect you from your dependencies as part of your testing process.

We've really done two different scenarios. One is the creation of a new API. We were able to create a simulation before we ever wrote a line of code, and so all of our customers who would use that gave us direct feedback very quickly. In a performance environment, we have lots of dependencies, lots of services that we talk to. Having the simulations gave us the ability to run test when we want rather than when they're available.

The things that we're interested mostly are deployment kinds of capability. We would like to deploy these simulators as part of our continuous deployment process. We would like to be able to auto-deploy them as part of the test mechanism to help test teams without having to set up the infrastructure in advance.

6 months.

We've had no issues with the stability of the solution, had no problems at all in the six months we've had it deployed.

One of the requirements that we had early on was the ability to handle high transaction rates. Our target was 700 transactions a second. We were just able to prove with our mix of services over 750 so very, very comfortable.

This is one development group. We have lots of different groups that are standing at the doorway to get in. It's a very exciting time.

We didn't use technical support during the evaluation. We've used it a lot since, mostly to try and fix things that we didn't quite understand properly, not bug fixes.

Listening to our executives, one of the key difficulties that the development teams were having is the ability to test faster, so they can't deliver content faster to our customers because they can't test fast enough mostly because of these dependencies and the outside suppliers. Having a service virtualization solution gives us the ability to disconnect ourselves from our suppliers and those blocking dependencies, allows us to go faster.

We're not really KPI-driven. It's really can we allow the team to test without the dependencies where they weren't able to do that before?

One of the reasons we picked the product was it was easy to set up. We signed our contract at the end of May, and we had our production instance up and running in the second week of June, so it was very easy to set up and it's been running solid since.

We really disconnected ourselves from the IT department. They run the infrastructure. It's then very stable and performant. Most of the administration is done by the engineering team itself, product engineering.

This solution is very valuable in terms of being able to speed up. One of the primary capabilities was the ability to consume it by our teams. How hard is it to learn? How hard is it to set up? Of the three vendors in the evaluation, the CA Service Virtualization was the easiest license model and the easiest to stand up and configure.

I've never really given anybody a 10 so I give them a 9. It's done everything it said it would do. We've got great consumption, early acquisition of the product. Support has been fantastic as we hope it would. The user interface is easy to learn. All of the things we set out as objectives have been met in the primary deployment.

CA Service Virtualization is an amazing solution, very easy to use, easy to train others on how to take advantage of it. I'd say jump on it.