Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

The primary use case of this solution is for creating virtual services, creating API testing, and creating virtual data.

The most valuable features are the recording and creating of virtual services. Especially in creating IBM MQ virtual services through recording.

It is introducing a lot more flexibility for us. It reduces time scales, getting time to market. It also helps us cross-skill some of the people, and start to really bring that DevOps mentality into the bank.

I suppose in our payments estate in the bank, it's key to us. Anything that we need to put through to payments, regulatory, industry-leading, that kind of thing, we need to get there quicker. It's expensive to maintain those complex systems. Virtualization gives you the opportunity to do that a lot cheaper. We can stand up those versions of it, rather than build the humongous end-to-end environments that they always require. It's helping drive that testing down to being a lot leaner.

It's time to market of course, and also the total cost of ownership. We don't have to build big end-to-end environments anymore. Previously, any major project would come along and say, "I need to build more kit," and you just keep filling data centers. You just can't sustain that. It's expensive to maintain, and we don't always close those down; so someone's paying to keep the lights on.

Whereas with SV, we can negate some of that, and actually just build them up against the virtual service. You still use the end-to-end environments at the end of the day for your site testing, but it means that actually we can get through the primary parts of it a lot quicker. It's good.

We mark up several APIs from web servers, JMS, and MQ Services with this solution. We use it to support our performance testing. Some of the virtual services that have been built by this solution will support somewhere around 2000 to 3000GPS perfectly.

There are several areas that are easily configurable. A person, without having a lot of development experience, should be able to perform most of the functions.

There are many different features available to build services with adequate response times, recording of visitors.

We use it for the virtualization of third-party APIs for performance testing.

Our second use case is related to the virtualization of TCP/IP protocols for third-party terminal insurance, which is used for insurance clients.

In the case of the virtualization of TCP/IP protocols for third-party terminal insurance, there was a device terminal, which was interacting with the application via the TCP/IP protocol. Most of the tools don't support that, but we were able to achieve it using Broadcom Service Virtualization.

To give you an example, we have had developers produce code later than we wanted to, but we've had some other stuff that was dependent on that. So what we were able to do was virtualize these assets and then go forward with our developer and not have to wait for these additional services to be available.

We have been using it extensively for the shift left process and testing. It helps us to accelerate and virtualize services and assets that we don't have. It enables to test faster.

CA Service Virtualization has helped us advance the development cycle when third-party interfaces are not available to us. We're able to simulate that activity. Working with the developers, we're able to get our testing site done in advance, so that when the integration starts, we're able to get further down the testing path with our third-party vendors.

We are able to get further testing on a couple of interfaces. We do a lot of third-party request out for a loan; fraud verification; credit bureau. A lot of times, those data setup and data needs take a longer period of time than what maybe we have, so we're able to virtualize both the credit bureaus and some of our fraud facilities to get the testing done.

Also, facilitating in the training environments, where training environments are typically used part time, you don't want necessarily to have all the hardware and software laying around part-time. We're able to virtualize those interfaces.

The most valuable feature of CA Service Virtualization is that overall, it is a system-based product for virtualizing the services. There are many tools that offer RESTful calls. However, with this product, we have many other options such as database service virtualization, mainframe virtualization and other wide range of virtualization options.

There are a lot of benefits of this solution but I will give you the top benefit from my experience. Since I am from the testing team, I have to test a particular service and the service needs to be developed either by a third party or I am dependent on my development team to complete the service development, only then I can start my testing process. However, with CA Service Virtualization, what I can do is I can start my testing from Scrum 1. I can do this by grabbing details from the developer in my team or the third-party service and ask for sample request responses. Using these sample request responses, I can create a virtual service and then no longer am I dependent on any third party or a developer for my testing process.

The only thing is that I create the service, deploy the virtual service and then use it for my testing; it's that simple.Thus it saves a lot of my time and if I am using any third-party services, then it saves me money as well.

A while ago, we were looking for a tool to do testing across the web services. During that time, we were doing some PoCs on SoapUI. We did a PoC with Lisa. The company name was ITKO. After going through several PoC sessions, we figured out that this would be beneficial because the functional testing, which we would be creating for those web services, could be leveraged for performance testing as well.

We have a conceptual testing document where we say, you run a single user-firing transaction against three simulators and you host your test there. Over a period of time, we matured from using web services to using all the web-based UI applications. The best part about it is that it goes one layer below the UI. It’s not dependent on the UI. It’s dependent on the transactions going back and forth between the application server and one layer below your browser.

Usually, with tools like Selenium, you just click. In this case, you post a transaction and test how far it goes.

We use it as a kind of defect-finding tool when it comes to regression testing and automation testing. You can’t use the tests against pages that have JavaScript calls being made from them. So CA wrote a Chrome plug-in for us, which, once installed, captures the transactions we aren’t able to see, like Fiddler. So, we have set up standards across those. At this point in time, other than the applications where we are having challenges, even with the additional plug-in, we are using CA Service Virtualization for testing.