Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

The features that I find most useful would be how easy it is to quickly get something up and running as a small test sample. The first test we had was simple transactions to it and emulating responses from there. We have Java and .NET APIs that we use to access the legacy system. Dev test works by hijacking the code and then you put an agent in it.

Also, it looks to see what classes you're calling. You can say, okay, if it hits this class, then I want to know. Then, the data that comes through there, you can analyze it and you can replay that data -- Java, .NET, or C#.

I wouldn't say that there's a tremendous amount that could use improvement. I think that with applications like this, it's easy to use it for the wrong reasons. Early on, I think we had ideas about leveraging it in places where it wasn't a good fit for us, where it wasn't going to have a large impact. We had to have a bit of guidance from CA as to where we should be focusing. After that, it wasn't as much of a problem. There are some interactions with customers, depending on what they use. Where maybe we were thinking about doing something that was more internal, but didn't make a tremendous amount of sense for us. There was a case where we tried to virtualize too much. There are limits to what can be done in that kind of testing. It's easy to just take the tool and go virtualize something that you really didn't need to virtualize.

It does require a higher level of support. This is not the kind of tool that you can just haul off just go make decisions on. You need some understanding as to what the right move is and I think CA's the only group that's going to be able to help you with that.

We haven't been using it extensively yet, as we're still in the POC phase, but the POC's that we've run through have been pretty easy to set up. We haven't had a truly deep dive. We've been fairly impressed with it just initially. What we're doing is we're trying to emulate connectivity from a legacy-backing system.

We're a little too early on to be able to comment on that yet.

There was no problem. We did our own setup just for our POC and it was no problem.

With not much other knowledge than maybe two days of training at CA, we were able to go in there and hook it up to our application that writes out to the legacy system, intercept the data that was going in, store that, and then virtualize the response. We did all of that within four hours.

It was decided at the enterprise level well before I got involved.

I guess to sum up, you will need to engage with CA to understand what the right virtualization is, to ensure that you're not wasting your time.

I would say that you need to have good buy-in at the enterprise level, you need to have good buy-in at your director-plus level.

• We mainly use it for performance testing.
• Being able to spin up virtual services without buying additional hardware and being able to test.
• Ability to shift left or simplify the SDLC process.

The benefits are cost savings on hardware and earlier defect identification. We have a bunch of metrics we just presented on this.

Currently we are in the early cycle. It meets our current needs. I see where there are things we potentially may need, but nothing in the near future.

Good. We haven't had any issues. This is beneficial because we had CA resources on site so they have been able to help us and the product dev team to be able to solve issues quickly.

Good. It was part of our POC in which we made sure it would scale to fit our environment. It was our criteria in why we chose CA over other vendors.

We really haven’t done a lot of that because we have CA resources on site who was able to handle the majority of them. The CA Resource on site has done everything and anything and solved problems quickly. We honestly haven’t run into many problems. Not much to answer.

We've looked at Service Virtualization for the last few years because we knew the benefits of it but for which we never had the financial backing to purchase a tool. We've known that we've needed it for a long time just because of the benefits and abilities to transform the IT organization. It took a big change in our IT organization to buy it.

We considered HP SV, IBM GreenHat or whatever it is called now, Parasoft, and another smaller one.

It was straightforward from CA's setup, but it was probably somewhere in between in terms of our internal process.

We set up on a Linux server which was complex due to internal security in our company that pose a challenge. Not a tool specific problem, but an internal process security issue.

We considered HP Service Virtualization, IBM Green Hat or whatever it is called now, Parasoft, and another smaller one.

We were looking for a tool that met the needs of what we're trying to do. We have specific criteria. Most tools can do the basic web services, message queues, etc. What set CA apart was the ability to do the Java Virtualization.

Do your homework, do what’s right for your organization. While the tools try to be one size fits all. They each do something better than the other and you have to pick one that fits your IT organization.

Virtualization.

I have used CA LISA in two organizations. In the first one, we were leveraging the virtualization capabilities to fill gaps with the middleware software for an ESB application. This enable the test teams to start earlier before the hardware and applications were fully ready for test.

The product is very robust and is obviously one of the front runners in the service virtualization space. Competitors have more user friendly user interfaces and some have front end systems which are easy to toggle and manipulate.

I have said many times that CA LISA is more of a technical programmer's tool, whereas their competitors are appealing both to the programmers as well as the basic user/business user/tester.

I've used it for three years.

No issues experienced.

No issues encountered.

No, as compared to competitors, studies have shown that CA seems more scalable, although for the average consumer of the products, they are all head-to-head.

While I have heard stories of varied levels of good and bad customer service from various clients, I have only experienced great support from CA.

8/10.

I have used both CA LISA as well as one of their competitors. When the competitor was chosen, it was due to overall capabilities and needs of the client, the cost, and the long term capabilities.

Their competitor offered an enterprise solution, whereas CA's costs was user-license based, and since the client wasn't sure of how many users we would scale to within a year, it was a better choice to go with the competitor.

The initial setup was easy and occurred within 1 full day, including configuration and full setup.

This was done with CA professional services and onsite training. CA provides very good support for their product, and was extremely helpful in both of the organizations where I installed the product.

When you look at pricing, it is important to understand what you specifically need. The CA LISA/Virtualization product has various types of licenses. If you go with the super user license, you get all of the access, but you have to ask yourself if you really need all of the capabilities. And even if you do, you likely only need one or two licenses. The rest can have the standard user license.

Reviewed options with Parasoft Virtualize and HP's virtualization tools.

We use this tool to be more agile and deliver daily releases to production, shortening the development cycle.

It hasn't matured enough yet to provide good prospects; we are still in the process of implementation. I can't tell you if anything in the process has improved or not, but the objective is to use this DevTest tool to shorten the development cycle. It hasn't proved itself yet. We've had it for a short time so I can't tell you if we succeeded or not.

The most valuable features include the capability to use other program languages such as PLSQR, JAVA, .NET. This is important because whenever the tool is limited you can extend it by writing your own code. The code is not limited to a specific language, it can hold several types of coding language.

CA Service Virtualization has its pros and cons. It's a strong framework and the feedback is good, however when it comes to acting as a test tool some improvements are required.

UI should be more user friendly: better usability, more testing oriented. This product emerged from the services virtualization domain and evolved to include application testing. They are very good in service virtualization, but in application testing they need to make some improvements. One of these improvements is to be more test oriented, which will allow the user to manage and control the test execution better and to organize the packages in a better, more user-friendly way. The users should be able to organize the test, test suites, and execution in a better way, such that scenarios can be integrated into the testing part. Currently its outside.

The application test should be more feature rich. I would also like to see seamless integration with DevOps. Currently it needs some scripting to integrate with DevOps.

It is very stable.

Very scalable. It's a strong framework, stable and scalable in a really good session.

When we started API and vacant testing, we needed a tool to support it. We did some research in the market and this solution has most of our requirements: it's stable, feature rich, and has many years in the market. This solution stood out as the best fit for our requirements. They are number one in service virtualization, although they are definitely not number one in application testing.

It was very complex, since it is a tool that is integrated with lots of software parts: all the servers, the middleware, the UI, etc. Integrating it in the development environment was really not straightforward. It took us several weeks to stand on our feet.

There were four vendors on the short list: 

• CA Service Virtualization
• SOAtest by Parasoft
• Green Hat (now Rational Integration Tester) by IBM.
• ReadiAPI by SmartBear

We chose CA as it fulfilled most of our requirements.

I would give CA an eight out of ten. It could be a ten on service virtualization, but it's definitely a 6 or 7 in the application testing area. These two are combined into one product (CA DevTest), so the overall total comes to an 8.

When selecting a vendor, our most important criteria is based on which areas are supported. As we are an enterprise, we have rich environments with many types of platforms and the most important requirement is that the tools will support these rich environments, protocols, technologies, and platforms.

In the end, your choice depends on what goal is more important to you: services virtualization or application tests. If it's services virtualization, go for DevTest; if it's application testing, then you should think twice.

The most valuable feature is the ability to virtualize almost any web service which allows us to perform testing and speed up our development.

It’s helped us in a number of ways. In addition to helping with testing and development, it has also allowed us to create a training environment that allows our agents to work on the latest changes to our software almost instantly.

My fallback would be scalability.

Oddly, when my capacity folks pull stats memory and CPU both show within normal limits. My users, app administrator, however, see degradation during peak periods.

We're working with our capacity management engineers and our CA SV specialist to analyze the performance stats and recommend a temporary solutions. I'm planning to upgrade to v10 in 2017, so I'm going to insure we have h/w that supports current needs and v10 +24 months.

The solution is very stable. We have not had any issues.

Scalability is the reason I rated it as 8/10. We’re going through some challenges with scalability right now. CA is helping us to get through that.

I have used technical support and they are generally very, very good. Sometimes it takes a while to get through the queue to get to the right person, but that’s just because they’re very busy.

We were not using another solution. We were doing manual stubbing. Developers were creating their own mini-virtualizations and this tool has helped us create them.

I definitely recommend going down the path of service virtualization. The payback is almost immediate.

When selecting a vendor, I look for reliability, honesty, and price. I don't look for the cheapest, but I look for the best value. What are they offering? What does it cost to get that? Can I get a return on investment from it?

Service virtualization is the most valuable feature because we can create end-to-end services without actual hardware, so that saves a lot of cost and money.

We do application performance management or testing, where we have two options: Either we have to build an infrastructure end-to-end or we have to use the service virtualization capability that can mimic the actual endpoints, which makes it much easier for testing.

There is always room for improvement. Microservices are coming, and I don't know how microservices are going to be virtualized.

They still have a long way to go because service virtualization is a new area and there is a lot happening in this world. They have to keep building on their product and services for us to get it in the future. They have to adapt in more areas.

They already know what we are looking for. We asked them to support the MASL. They worked it out and then they provided us support. Other areas they can improve on are the scalability, failover capabilities, so that you don't have to depend upon a single instance of the server.

Stability’s pretty good so far. We have been using it for the last three years, so it's pretty good.

Stability’s one area that needs work; it's good, but the challenge is that scaling at a very high level is slightly problematic at this point in time. It meets our requirements so far, but I think they need to improve it.

Technical support are very proactive; we have very good support.

We did not previously use a different solution. We had a homegrown solution, and that was easy and cheaper, but the problem was maintaining that homegrown solution over a long period of time. It was quite an investment, so buying this product made sense.

When selecting a vendor, we look equally at the process and technology aspects, from end to end; what are the services they can provide.

My team did the initial setup, and it's pretty straightforward.

I don't want to disclose which vendors were on the short list, but there were a couple of vendors, and we found out that those products were not mature enough.

Web service virtualization solution: It’s cost effective over a period of time and provides flexibility in product validation in the SOA space.

Specifically, service virtualization has reduced infrastructure costs by close to 40%. It helps in early problem detection and early fix, leading to early product release.

It would be great to have improved logging for trace requests and responses at the virtualized service level. The existing feature needs improving.

I have used this solution for nearly four years.

I have noticed performance issues such as the virtual server requires a restart after using it for a certain amount of time, to make sure it responds better.

Technical support is 8/10.

I had only used SoapUI before. LISA has better built-in capabilities that reduce the need for scripting/coding. Also, modeling is appealing and easily understandable.

Initial setup for service testing was easy, but setup of virtualization server was bit complex and needed help from an expert.

We built it in house. It was bit complex in the beginning but we gradually understood the setup better and are comfortable with it now.

My personal feeling is that the licensing cost keeps smaller organisations away due to affordability, but bigger organisations can afford it easily. However, an important point is that over time, there is a good ROI, given that tool is integrated well for virtualization of provider systems.

My personal opinion is that the tool is really good as a service virtualization solution rather than a service testing tool.

• Codeless testing: There are no test scripts to write and maintain in DevTest. It helps to easily design test scripts without any programming knowledge.
• Complete test coverage for heterogeneous, distributed architectures: in a single test environment, DevTest invokes and verifies functionality at every layer of the application - from dynamic web UIs, to web services, ESB/JMS messaging layers, EJB servers, Java objects, databases, file systems, legacy objects and much more.
• Service Virtualization: Virtualization reduces the dependency of third-party services/system and allows us shift-left testing.

Our application requires the integration of many services across many APIs both internal and external. Due to this increased complexity, it is important that the testing of complex systems also starts early as possible. Leaving the testing until the end of product delivery increases project risk and the cost of fixing any defects found during later development stage. Using the power of CA Service Virtualization, it is now possible to perform integration testing on every application build. For application components still under development, service virtualization allows integration testing to occur even earlier in the development cycle simulating the missing parts of the system. Service virtualization also allows driving of error scenarios from both internal and external systems that may be hard or even impossible to produce, even with the real systems.

They still need to improve the reporting functionality for better customization. Currently the report functionality does not allow us to go beyond 5000 records where the display show all the records also more filters needs to provide to generate/customize test reports.

I've been using DevTest 8.4 and Application Insight. 8.4 for the last five years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

The customer service is excellent.

The technical support is excellent.

For API test previously I used Selenium. To create/maintain a test script in Selenium Java coding is required. With DevTest, Java programming knowledge is not mandatory. We can do most of the things using in built DevTest assertions and filters without any scripting.

Setup/installation is straightforward. The product installation guide helps lot.

We did it in-house. We have our own product expert team for implementation.

The CA community will help us with any difficulties with the implementation. You can find it https://communities.ca.com/places.