Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

• Service Virtualization
• Web Service/MQ/Database Testing
• Selenium Integration
• Junit Integration
• ALM + Dev Test
• and a long list of other features.

We have saved a lot of money and testing time by using CA SV. We started with Web Services and we've now covered all Mainframe, DB, MQ.

4 years

No issues with deployment.

When starting we had issue like LISA getting stuck while we were reading csv files doing performance testing.

No issues with scalability.

9/10. And we love the community.

9/10

I've worked on RIT also. It's not that easy to use and lots of things are missing. But CA SV makes it so easy. It's three steps to create the virtual service and deploy.

Initial setup was straightforward. Read the agreement and close your eyes, next... next...

In-house

I'm looking forward to testing Devtest 8.0.2 and the new ideas. I've been impressed so far.

The ease with which we can create virtual services and view the flow in the model are valuable features of this product.

CA Service Virtualization has enabled us to give the client demos in a very effective manner even when the environment is not available. It has also enabled us to shift-left.

There should be an option to search a transaction that is VSI based through a transaction number. It would really be a great addition.

I have been using this tool for three and half years now.

Stability issues do arise if there is not enough system memory.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The technical support is good. I would give it a 8/10 rating.

The initial setup was quite straightforward because the steps to install and configure were clear.

Pricing is a bit on the higher side. Owing to its high cost, proper business justification needs to be provided to the client, if this tool is to be proposed.

We evaluated another solution, SoapUI NG Pro.

I would recommend others to use CA Service Virtualization for all their virtualization needs as it is easy to use and the support provided via the CA Communities is also great.

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.

CA Service Virtualization (Virtualize) has been used to a greater degree, and Test has been used to a certain extent. The clients I have worked for purchased CA Service Virtualization with the primary goal of virtualizing web service calls to a specific back-end functions that faced constraints (performance, availability, and/or data constraints). By using CA Service Virtualization (Virtualize), they were able to overcome the stated limitations.

In the performance test of a middleware application, we were able to run a much higher load with CA Service Virtualization which some of the real endpoints cannot handle. 

• By achieving this, you can better measure and get the performance throughputs of the System under test (SUT), as well as, narrow down the bottlenecks with a greater precision of the SUT.
• In one of the environments, we needed a 24/7 application availability, which was not realized when the middleware application was pointed to the real backend. This was due to one or more of the real backend being down on a consistent basis. Pointing to CA Service Virtualization services, this goal was almost achieved.
• Eliminating the test data constraints: When testing against various backend, sometimes you need to test with a specific test data (such as a valid Credit Card number) or your test data needs to go through a series of validations in order to get a good response from a subsequent web service request. Using CA Service Virtualization validate, this constraint is no longer an issue.

I have used this solution for a little more than 2 years now.

We had issues in the support for virtualization of JDBC connectivity. Also, using Java Agent virtualization was a maintenance overhead in an earlier version of CA Service Virtualization. I am not certain if this has been improved in the current version.

It was very straightforward.

We initially used CA consultants to extend their product to handle some of the data protocols that could not be handled out of the box. The CA consultants did help in doing the initial setup. After they were done, we were able to spread the services and increase the scope of usage on our own.

Without trying other products in the service virtualize space, I feel very comfortable working with this product. It does its job well, is not difficult to use and grasp, and the support is very good. I would definitely recommend this product!

We are into performance engineering. There are a lot of back-end systems that are sometimes unavailable, or there are a lot of various dependencies, and we're trying to get rid of those. That's one of the reasons we got into DevTest. 

And it's been helping us quite a bit now. We've been able to step out a lot of back-end systems. It's performed pretty well. There were a few hiccups, but we got in touch with the senior architects and they helped us out with fine tuning and, since then, it's been working out well.

The most valuable feature is that it supports so many protocols. We, being a large bank, have almost all the protocols, and it supports all of them, so that's one good thing.

I think it definitely helps us reduce time to market, and in terms of dollar savings it helps us quite a bit. There are many testing applications that reach out to third-party vendors where every transaction costs, and we are able to virtualize all of that and reduce the financial aspect.

One major feature I would like to see is on the user administration part. Right now, anybody can access any of the folders and any of the projects. If they could bring in someone amount of user administration, that would help us a lot.

Stability so far has been good. There have been no issues. There was a learning curve, about a year or so. It took us some time. It's not a plug and play tool. There was a lot of customization that had to be done, but with all of that done I think it is quite stable now.

The hiccups we experienced were mostly to do with scalability.

There are multiple protocols that we actually work on, like HTTP, HTTPS and then MQ and TCP. HTTP and HTTPS were fairly basic, and we were able to get things done pretty efficiently. When it came to MQ and TCP, we came across a lot of challenges. That's when we got CA engaged and they helped us fine tune the tool itself so that we could reach the scale that we wanted to.

I would say they're a four out of five. A lot of times what happens is, they come back with scripted answers and then we reach out to the account manager or somebody. Then they look into it and they help us out. That's why I'm taking out one star for them. Otherwise, they've always been good.

We were on the lookout for a service virtualization tool. 

I would say it was complex.

The initial set up, if you look at the basic functions, it's quite straightforward. But for the scale that we were planning to implement it at, we did not get a lot of support from CA. So a lot of it had to be done in-house. We had to bring in our own architects and do a lot of environment setup and the like. We did not get a lot of support from CA. That's one area where I would say CA could have helped out better.

We did look at a couple of tools in the market. We did a PoC on DevTest. Back then it was called Lisa. Everything went well, so that's how we ended up getting into DevTest.

We didn't do a POC on the IBM product, I think it's called Green Hat - IBM's has a service virtualization tool - and we were actually contemplating that tool as well.

We went with CA because the PoC went well. There were a couple of guys who came in and actually helped us out with all the use case scenarios that we had, and we were able to implement it successfully. That was one of the reasons we went ahead with CA.

When selecting a vendor, our criteria, what we are looking for are 

• easy to use tools
• a good feature set
• and then awesome support.

I would say it's an eight out of 10. Eight because it has so much going on and there's a lot to learn, and there are a lot of things you can do with the tool. It requires quite a lot of learning effort. It's not plug and play. And a lot of customization has to go into it.

I would advise going with DevTest, definitely. It would depend on what you are looking to get out of the tool. If it's some of the basic protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, you could actually do it yourself. But if you're looking at a much larger scale, then definitely DevTest is the right tool to go ahead with.

• Web service virtualization
• MQ virtualization

These two features helped us to build a virtual development environment for continuous testing and continuous development of our product.

The release cycle in our project was initially three weeks and we wasted time waiting for environment availability, because the dependent services were still under development. In Agile, we need to get the test environment up and ready before the code completion.

With the help of virtual services developed by CA DevTest/Service Virtualization, we were able to create the virtual environment.

Now, the release cycle is reduced to two weeks, with a fully developed virtual service environment.

We developed virtual services for the HTTP and MQ protocols.

Even though there is no comparison with its peers and all the necessary things are right in hand, there is room for improvement with the Virtualizing Mainframe components. The concept of agent installation is a tedious process and should have been much simpler.

I have used it for 5+ years and counting.

I have not yet encountered any stability issues. I mean, I don't think you will, if you have right configuration.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 8 of 10. The community forum is the best of its kind and we can find solutions to all general issues.

We previously used SoapUI Mocking; it is simple static virtual services. For dynamic behavior that takes less time to create (hardly two minutes), DevTest is the ultimate.

Installation and setup was very easy. It is easiest tool in the market to learn and implement.

Compared to the initial license cost of the product, the cost has been reduced a lot and it is competitive. Of course, iPhone does not match Nokia on price, as the price reflects the quality. Nonetheless, the price for this product is very competitive.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated SoapUI Pro, IBM Rational Test Virtualization Server/GreenHat and Parasoft SOAtest.

Just go with it, if you don’t have constraints regarding price; it is the best. Otherwise, for simple virtual services, go for SoapUi Pro. Rule out the others.

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.