Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

It's got a standardized format for endpoints as well as containerized, virtualized endpoints that are used by everyone on our team. We can spin up these endpoints if necessary.

We're still working with it, but it's given us a common deliverable. The overall testing strategy allows us to have more common strategies amongst various products.

The user interface and usability of the tool is not the best. They could definitely be improved upon in the next release.

Also, we are hamstrung by different releases and are not using all of the features, but it is useful.

It’s not stable as of yet, as it needs a lot of infrastructure.

We haven't done so yet, but we're hoping it will be scalable.

We interact with an internal department that works between CA and ourselves. They have all of the info we need.

I think we were just using many different tools to achieve the same thing. We needed one tool to do it all, and this fit the bill.

The initial setup was straightforward.

You should make an overall testing plan, otherwise it’s difficult to implement quickly.

I’d compare it to open-source solutions that already exists. Consider your organization before diving deep. For us, we are building up our maturity, and this solution is built to a higher standard.

One of the key benefits is that it really reduces the need for an organization to have all these backend infrastructure systems which are very, very costly to actually procure and to maintain. Service Virtualization allows you to test without actually having physical backends there. It pretends that they're there.

By virtualizing application services, you can actually give them to whoever needs to use it. They make a request, get a response, and they use the application without even knowing that it's not connected to a real live system in the backend.

One of the things I like about it is it actually does what it claims to do. It virtualizes application services. A lot of the times companies come in with their glossies and all this kind of stuff, and they put it up on a nice presentation, and they tell you all about it. Then we try to do it, and it just doesn't do it.

This product just works really, really well.

The problem is getting the developers to do more than just hooking into QA backends. They don't do integrated testing so that the first time you bump into an integrative problem is when it hits our QA environment, which are integrated. They discover a defect later on down the cycle and it's more costly to fix. The developers are not finding their own bugs and fixing them.

This tool would allow them to do simulated integration tests without having all this backend infrastructure. They can run on it so we build the services for them, but they're not using it for that capability because it hasn't been presented it to them in that way.

So really the biggest area of improvement is just in terms of who CA should be focusing the tool's use. It would be best to focus on the developers.

It was purchased from another larger corporate project and just kind of sat there, paid for but on the shelf. What happened was the maintenance comes up once a year, and our VP says, "You know, I'm paying 250 grand for this thing. Who's used this?"

We've been running one server for a couple years now. This year we've decided to spread our wings a little, and we're going to procure four more. It can replicate one setup on all five servers, or replicate five different setups, one on each.

The support is there when we need it.

We've had this one for several years, but we just started using over the last two years or so. No other options were used.

I would suggest that you do a proof of concept. Get it in your shop and try it out. See what you like. Look at other tools and compare them. IBM has got I think a tool called Green Hat. Hit the big guys that sell software like that, and do proofs of concept to make your own decision.

Use the web portal that allows you to develop services without actually buying the product. You can go in there and test it.

The most valuable feature is definitely how quickly you can get up and mock something that’s not completely done. It’s very easy and it's extensible. You can add any custom logic that you need.

It decreases a lot of bottlenecks when you’re stuck waiting on a downstream service to get done. We don’t lose so much time and money on that. With Service Virtualization, we can get rid of all that and develop a UI without waiting on all those. It increases production and decreases lost time.

It has awesome stability, and we haven’t had any problems. Once you get it up and running, it stays up and running. The only thing that happened was that the enterprise dashboard hung up, but rebooting fixed the problem. This has only happened on super rare occasions, only two or three times.

We’re still in the baby steps of implementation, but with the teams we have, we can write one service that multiple teams can use. As we continue to grow, we know we can write one thing that multiple teams can use and it will grow with us.

We have on-site meeting and emails, and they were very professional and responsive, usually within an hour. Our technical account manager helps.

I was not involved initially, but I am involved in upgrades with enterprise dashboard and writing instructions on upgrading client dashboards. I haven’t heard anything bad about initial setup, though.

Nothing can be perfect, but it’s definitely really close. The documentation is awesome, but tutorial-based instructions would be helpful.

We had one of CA’s engineers come on site and work with us for one week and that sped up our use of it more efficiently.

1. By virtualization, for all dependent services, we are able to create isolated test environments.
   
2. We virtualize fragile services and deploy them with the 'Failover' mode so that we can fall back to the VS in case the real service returns an error.
3. We virtualize third-party paid services, as well as in-development services, to minimize costs and delays.

In short, we are able to save a lot of valuable time. Testers and developers no longer complain about not having access to dependent services. We don't have to share/reserve resources or worry about our development being blocked by unavailable services.

The ability to create virtual services and deploy them as Docker containers, and include them in our Jenkins build pipelines, is a valuable feature.

It was critical for us to prevent possible elements from "unnecessarily" breaking the pipeline. If I'm pushing a particular web service through the pipeline and want that to be tested in isolation, it is a big problem if everything fails due to an irrelevant dependent service.

The use of containers provided a very flexible solution.

The workstation component has a very out-dated UI and is in dire need of a facelift.

There are too many fragmented web components that could easily and logically be merged. For example, Service Catalog, Enterprise Dashboard, Portal, and Identity and Access Manager are all separate web applications. Why not merge them in one web app?

This is a very mature and very stable product, although error prevention could be added into the product, for the sake of improving user-friendliness.

The idea of Virtual Service Environments (VSE) makes the product extremely scalable. Especially with the use of containers, you won't have concerns about resource wastage.

This solution has first-class support, and it couldn't be any better.

I used HPE SV before. It was very user-friendly but cannot be compared with CA DevTest, as it lacks a lot of the important features.

This initial setup of this solution is not straightforward at all. The installation is unnecessarily complex. Again, user-friendliness is not an area that CA DevTest can boast about.

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.

It helps us to remove barriers that we have with dependencies on services that we don't own, or services that don't even exist yet, or services that are junky. It helps us to shift left and do our development earlier without waiting on those dependencies to be available.

I work in a test environment so teams come in and they do performance testing on their solutions. Whenever we can get their solution to work with DevTest it makes everything super quick. It reduces setup time, all the engineering you have to go through, and reduces it by days.

You can create virtual services from a live recording or you can even take raw traffic and convert that into request/response pairs, and you can create an entire virtual service from just those simple little files, and that's super awesome when that all works out.

I think the size of DevTest is pretty massive. It's hard to tell what different parts of it can be used to do different things. It gets kind of big, so if they could modulize it more, and lead you to a common work flow, that would be pretty awesome.

They're constantly making improvements, so it's gotten better every time they have released a new version.

It's very stable. It's very reliable.

We spread it out across, I think, 12 different teams using it right now, and no problems.

I have used tech support. They're awesome. They usually get back within minutes if you have a problem and they can get you up and running really quickly.

I was surprised, because usually customer service is not that prompt. But I've used it probably seven times, and every time has been an easy, quick experience. 

There's definitely a learning curve, but they're there with you on site, helping you get set up. At least in our case they were with us, so that removed a lot of the problems.

I give it an eight out of 10, because nothing is ever perfect, and there's definitely a learning curve to it. But if you put some time into it, it definitely helps you out. 

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?

The biggest value for us was writing all the stories and figuring out what stories are going to get into which sprint. It also helps us with organizing the backlog and dependencies. We've found those features to be useful to us.

In terms of improving the way the organization functions, it gives us lot of visibility into what features are getting released when. It also helps us track across the organization in a much better fashion. I think visibility is the biggest benefit that we got out of implementing CA Service Virtualization.

We would like to see more robust dependency management. This is the only thing that comes to my mind.

We have not had any issues with stability. I think things have been working fine for us so far.

We've started a little slow. There are just a couple of teams that are using CA Service Virtualization, so we have not really scaled it up for multiple teams across the organization. But within our group, there are like 3 or 4 teams that are using it right now.

We have not used technical support so far. Thankfully, we didn't have to use them.

We did not have any previous solutions, but our organization was moving towards this. We evaluated a few products and CA seemed to be a good option that will fit all of our needs.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but there was somebody in my team that was involved. I don't think we encountered a lot of issues or challenges as such. We had to, of course, pull some experts from CA as well just to get their ideas on how we're supposed to set up, how things work, and what are best practices. Other than that, the first couple of sprints we had to learn and tweak a little bit as part of our retrospectives. Otherwise it's been pretty much okay.

We had Pivotal Tracker and probably a couple of other vendors as well. I don't remember their names. We went with CA Service Virtualization due to the user interface. We found it to be more intuitive than the others. We felt that it can probably scale up to the needs of what we have within the organization in terms of integrating with the rest of the ecosystem.

Potential users need to clearly know what they want, how they want to implement it, and how they want to use it. Then, once they have clarity, they can figure out how they want to set up the solution and go from there.