What are the benefits of Service Virtualization?
Service Virtualization removes dependencies and associated headaches which in turn reduces time to market, costs, and allows team to deliver high quality features.
Benefit 1: Reduce Dependencies & Headaches:
Dependencies may come in two forms: internal dependencies in which testing cannot proceed if a component is not fully developed, or external dependencies in which a third-party component outside of your control may not be available yet or may have limited amount of third-party calls. Service Virtualization can simulate these specific components so you are no longer dependent on these other components or have to worry about throttling (which limits how many times you can access a service), or costs associated with third party components. Strong virtualization tools allow you to quickly spin up a service to interact and test with. Typically, there is a large overhead involved in coordinating with separate team just to create a virtual system. Because these types of dependencies are avoided, teams can work in parallel, which saves time and money.
Benefit 2: Reduce Time to Market:
Software Development Life Cycle may involve a lot of waiting – an app developer may wait for internal colleagues or a third-party to release API, an API developer may be waiting for a fellow integrator release, or a tester may be waiting for a final piece of code. By simulating components through virtualization, teams can move faster, work in parallel and conduct load and risk tests leading to greater productivity. Virtualization also allows organizations to bring internal and external beta testers before the application or API is ready. Many virtualization tools will also allow developers to switch between a virtual environment and the real asset – otherwise this requires lengthy rebuild of the application. This reduces time to market.
Benefit 3: Increase Quality:
Service Virtualization allows you to have deeper control of your testing environment. In order to thoroughly evaluate an application, it must be tested under a variety of conditions. Virtualization allows you to very quickly spin up a service/API and conduct different tests such as: load tests, performance tests, functional tests. These types of tests can be done early in the development lifecycle, and not blocked by other functions. By being able to replicate what a service does within an environment, developers can understand how it will interact with other parts of the system then design for those needs while testers can simultaneously test. This in turn increases productivity, reduces risk and allows teams to flag issues early in the process.
Benefit 4: Reduce Costs:
Service virtualization reduces costs such as services charges to a third-party API, database or service. By mocking or mimicking how the service acts in the development and production stages you can bypass these associated costs and work efficiently. Secondly, service virtualization reduces infrastructure costs and operating expenses as less money is needed for accessing, recovering, and reusing what is in the cloud. Finally, there are labor costs associated with idle time are saved.
Use Cases for API Virtualization:
There can be a wide array of use cases for service virtualization – we have, at a high level, touched upon some of them previously. The strongest API virtualization tools help conduct different types of testing, increases quality and increases speed:
Use Cases Where API Virtualization Helps Testing to Ensure High Quality:
API Performance Testing & Third Party Sandboxing:
Performance testing helps understand the full capabilities of the API under an array of conditions. Understanding how an API behaves under delays, high traffic scenarios, and more provide key insights on the user experience. Again, API requests could cost money or be unavailable, making it difficult for testers to evaluate specific conditions. With API virtualization, you can model these APIs and run these tests from the very beginning of the software development life-cycle. Through virtualization you have greater, more granular control of your API conditions to create more advanced tests. This gives greater peace of mind that all scenarios are covered.
Example: A financial organization has a unique combination of financial products. To ensure test coverage, a lot of effort went into finding specific customers with the set of products needed to test each use-case. With a virtualization tool like ReadyAPI they can easily set up expected responses. They were able to easily configure “customers” with product mixes, edge case scenario responses, responses for negative tests, and one-off use case responses to ensure test coverage and quality.
API Load Testing:
One key aspect of performance testing is load testing – understanding how your API performs under high traffic / load conditions. Many times, load testing happens at the point of release or even after application has been deployed which is too late. By using virtual environments, you can conduct various unique load testing scenarios. Some APIs may charge per call, or cannot handle a large volume of calls, so load testing in virtual environments can cheaply show how your application functions under heavy loads.
Long-term Automated Testing:
Additionally, you can automate load testing so you can catch flaws in the code right when they appear. There are an abundance of different use cases and scenarios under which your API must perform. With mocking, you would have to build out each of these cases separately, however through virtualization, results from your load tests can be automated and can run (even after our API is released).
Automate Different Testing Scenarios in Various Message Types
Strong API virtualization tools help you create automated testing scenarios in various message types and protocols, including REST, JSON, WADL and JMS. It also allows for multilayer validation automation across multiple endpoints, for end-to-end testing. API Virtualization allows you to visualize how messages and events go through complex distributed architectures, then enables you to combine all these things into repeatable tests without dependencies on anything or anyone else. This greatly simplifies the testing process to ensure the application is performing the way it should be.
API Extreme Case Testing:
If you want to create some obscure conditions to test the limits of your API, you can use service virtualization to set extreme conditions. This can range from poor connectivity to high call volumes to other conditions that are less predictable until your API is released into the wild. By using an API virtualization tool to make a complete replica of your API, you can then alter its environment to understand how it would behave under certain conditions.
Failure Case Testing:
Understanding the user experience is extremely important – a poor user experience can lead to diminished brand equity and loss of potential profits. It is important to test how an application behaves when something fails but this can be difficult. An API virtualization tool can test against downtime, slow response time, if a downstream integration breaks down, and allows you to fail safely and make sure your error messages are accurate early in the development lifecycle. This can help you position yourself for success.
Security Testing
Security is also a vital part of an application and poor security may cause customers to distrust your organization. API security must be tested before release. API virtualization allows you to replicate all aspects of your environment, your API and what its integrating with to make sure all components are extremely secure.
Secure Training Simulations Example:
One great example of a use case for a service virtualization solution like ReadyAPI comes from Zurich Insurance Group, a financial services company that has built an internal application that they use for training their employees. It involves weekly training on the financial applications that they sell, and they need to simulate account creation and moving money.
Zurich found that, with service virtualization, they could visualize access to all these systems, and can do training for their products without actually interacting with their systems. Previously, they had to reset and reconfigure the whole system, which was very costly and time-consuming. Now, with ReadyAPI service virtualization, they don’t even have to buy the hardware to configure it, set it up, and tear it down. By creating a safe environment in these very important systems with huge risk, it makes it very segmented from the rest, as, from a security perspective, they would never be able to run a training system on one of the real systems. This allows them to extend their functional testing and virtualize.
Read more about how the Zurich Insurance Group runs virtual training through service virtualization.
Test Even When Components Are Not Available:
Testing gets delayed and complicated when key components are not available (internally or externally). Being able to test early in the life-cycle will help ensure quality and cheaply fix bugs. Through virtualization, you can simulate APIs or other components even if they are not built or available. API virtualization gets rid of dependencies allowing you to focus on testing. Additionally, there may be times when parts of an API may be available and there is a need to switch from a virtual environment to the actual endpoint. Many tools help change the routing configuration without having to change the application altogether.
Example: In Capital One, when real APIs are available, a redeployment of the firmware was required and changes found during testing would require that the firmware be reverted back. The rollout and roll back of the firmware cost 3 hours of lost productivity and variability. Service V routing feature enabled them to change the route between the real API and the virtualized API without firmware changes.
Prove The Concept Before Actually Building:
API virtualization also allows you to create proof of concepts even before building out a product. You can simulate services built of particular APIs and gauge whether it is a product worth building. This can save time, money, and allows for rapid, agile, iterative feedback at important stages of development. In the end service virtualization helps build richer products that customers and partners want.
Find the Best API to Integrate with:
If you are a Software as a Service (SaaS) it is common to integrate with different tools through strategic partnerships. It may be difficult and expensive to integrate with many tools at once. API Virtualization can create different scenarios where you can try different integration points. This helps with prioritization and helps find the right integration partner to enhance the quality of the product. Additionally, this can save time and money and prevent you from investing in a poorly paired partnership.
Use Cases Where Service Virtualization Increases Speed:
Easier Coordination - Reduce Time to Test For Microservices:
Microservices are another popular circumstance where you have small components independently released, changed and redeployed at any given time. They are an important part of continuous deployment, but make it difficult to test for continuous integration, as each service can come from any variety of locations and dissimilar environments. While developers gain more and more independence, there needs to be some sort of coordination throughout, which means continuous, automated testing. Often this means having to deploy all the microservices within an organization when running tests for a new API. With API virtualization, developers can install just the one microservice they are working on and then virtualize the others through virtual instances. It can cut testing microservices down from a day to just a few hours.
Reduce Dependencies and Have QA Involved at The Beginning:
“Shifting Right” styled processes have QA involved in testing from the start, offering feedback to developers. API virtualization allows QA to dive in and test works in progress in an exact copy of the environment, without the developers having to release their features.
Enhance Continuous CI/CD Testing:
Fortune 500 companies can have hundreds of Scrum teams working asynchronously — imagine all those dependencies! If you working in a continuous integration and continuous deployment and delivery company, how in the world can you test continually? Well, a lot of the time, that part is ignored or forgotten because of the dependencies.
To prepare a truly secure, bug-free release, you need continuous testing or the execution of automated tests as part of the software delivery pipeline for immediate feedback. Simply making sure everything works isn’t enough. You’ll also need to ensure that you’re meeting system requirements and larger business goals, and, of course, making sure all your integrations are stable and continuous. API virtualization enables this, by empowering QA to test even while the API is still being developed. It also allows app testers to make sure they can integrate properly with a third-party API, even when that app is far from ready for release.
Enhance DevOps Transformation:
In order for you to achieve continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), you need to automate at least 80 percent of your testing. API testing is particularly important here because it helps assure that, as you add new features, your whole integration pipeline — made up of both internal and external APIs — still works. As the lines blur between development and operations and everyone becomes more agile, releases and feedback loops are much more frequent. However, these teams often run UI-only test suites, which these feedback cycles often break. API virtualization allows you to simulate dependencies earlier so you can set up automated testing as you go.
Iteratively Design:
If you have an iterative design environment, you can virtualize the API as a way to quickly try out new things, without creating the full API. This is a very agile way to try new features and partnerships without heavily investing in them.
Accelerate User Interface Testing.
Service virtualization tools like SmartBear ReadyAPI enable you to describe common UI integrations via Web services like AJAX and SOA. This helps with you perform UI testing, anytime, anywhere without interruptions. You can emulate external environments which lets you gain more control over the data returned via Web services. And, of course, you can develop and test the UI integrations even before those Web services are available.