Accelerate Development and Testing Cycles With Service Virtualization

Allow development and testing teams to work on systems that may require specific services that are unavailable or difficult-to-access before it's deployed to production.

Software teams today are working in concert on highly dependent systems, pushing code to production rapidly - reducing timelines from weeks or months to just hours or days. Complicating this is the complexity of modern software which makes automated testing highly dependent on unavailable or difficult-to-access services. To prevent these unavailable dependencies from slowing testing, service virtualization aims to simulate their use in our system for 100% availability and configuration.

Service virtualization can all but remove that bottleneck and allow full-system testing almost immediately. By putting virtualization into the hands of everyone, we can quickly mirror API definitions, unavailable internal services, or expensive third-party APIs.

The Benefits of Service Virtualization

Enable Continuous Testing
Continuous deployment requires constant testing against highly available systems, at all points in the delivery pipeline. Service virtualization ensures that all systems are ready to test at all times.
Reduce Testing Delays
Complex systems and third-party cloud services can seriously hinder testing teams trying to move fast. Run integration, end-to-end, and performance tests earlier in the pipeline with service virtualization.
Speed Development Cycles
Definition-driven API development allows testers and developers to work on the same system in parallel. Virtualize a definition like OAS and allow teams to work in tandem - drastically accelerating release velocity.
   
Increased Test Coverage
Produce hard-to-replicate application state and performance issues in your service, allowing your development team to create graceful fallbacks and your testers to build complex test cases.
Reduced Testing Costs
With service virtualization, you can reduce third-party costs or rate limits, or expensive internal services allowing you to test early and often with incurring massive capital costs.
Faster Debugging
Isolate services and endpoints during testing and integration for enhanced debugging. Switching services between real and virtual can be done programmatically or with a simple click.

Virtualization & SmartBear Make Perfect Sense:

When Your API Is Not yet Complete

Before your API is even deployed, virtualize a definition like OAS or WADL to create a living, breathing API back by real or synthetic data in just minutes.

When Your API Is Unavailable for Testing

Have tight windows of availability when testing your application end-to-end? Remove dependencies on highly brittle systems or important production data with virtualization.

When Your API Is out of Your Control

Applications and services today are built on third-party APIs and dependencies. It can difficult to access data of third-party services to test failure states, edge-cases, and other scenarios.

When Your API Is Expensive to Test 

APIs are often rate limited or expensive to call during test runs - regression testing can start racking up serious capital expenses. Virtualization eliminates that cost.

When Your APIs Can't Be Load Tested

Load testing third-party or critical APIs are often an impossibility due to risk of DDOS, capital costs, reduced performance in production, and hard to replicate scenarios.

Agile Innovation

Agile shops are constantly pushing the boundaries on the speed of development and innovation, deploying code into the wild at a rapid pace. Service virtualization can help boost your teams pace of innovation by removing the dependencies that slow agile software teams down.

ReadyAPI can virtualize downstream applications and services, ensuring your team can develop or test on internal or external applications with absolutely zero limitations.