What Is Service Virtualization? Benefits & Use Cases

Software development can grind to a halt when external services, crucial for application functionality, are unavailable for testing. Reasons can range from ongoing development on those services to cost limitations or simple maintenance downtime. This is where service virtualization steps in for developers and testing teams.

Service virtualization creates simulated versions of specific services or dependencies in a heterogeneous application environment. In simpler terms, it acts as a stand-in. It allows developers to mimic the functionality of essential services, databases, APIs, and other dependencies that an application relies on, even when these components are unavailable or difficult to access.

This allows developers to test their applications independently, identify and address issues early in the development cycle, and also leads to faster development, improved code quality, and a smoother transition to production.

Why Businesses Use Service Virtualization

Service virtualization offers several advantages for businesses, streamlining the software development process and boosting development team efficiency. Let’s explore some of the key benefits.

Minimize or Eliminate Testing Downtimes

One of the primary challenges in software validation is the availability of dependent systems. When a dependency becomes unstable or inaccessible for testing purposes, test cases will fail causing disruptions to automation workflows.

Teams often experience downtimes as they must wait to run their regression suite due to environmental roadblocks. These wait times can result in late-stage defects due to inadequate testing, which in turn can result in release delays. Service virtualization addresses this by enabling component simulation, allowing testing to continue even when actual services are unavailable. This minimizes downtime and ensures a smoother, more continuous testing process.

Increase Development Team Productivity

Service virtualization enables parallel development and continuous testing. Decoupling development from external dependencies and creating dedicated virtual test environments for each software team empowers them to work in parallel. In turn, developers can focus on building core functionalities without waiting for access to the test environments.

In some cases, teams may be unable to start testing because certain dependencies are still in development. Service virtualization solves this problem by creating an intelligent simulation of the missing dependencies, allowing teams to begin validating integration workflows sooner.

When parallel teams share test environments, their velocity is often slowed as time to access the environment needs to be scheduled. Often, components in these environments modified to fit one team’s requirements need to be reverted to their original state to ensure testing accuracy for the parallel team, which creates delays and wait times.

By generating virtual test environments that can be cloned, provisioned, and deployed on demand, individual teams can gain better control over their environment dependencies enabling them to increase testing velocity.

Testing in virtual environments also allows teams to control and modify the behavior of dependencies, empowering them to conduct negative or rainy-day testing, increasing coverage and overall quality. This approach enables earlier and more frequent testing, fostering a more agile development environment that boosts productivity and accelerates delivery cycles.

Accelerate Provisioning of Applications, Environment, and Resources

Resource optimization is another key benefit of service virtualization. Setting up a test environment is time-consuming, requiring significant resources to replicate and configure the environment accurately. This process involves provisioning hardware, configuring software, and ensuring all necessary integrations and dependencies are in place, which can lead to substantial testing delays.

By creating virtual environments with service virtualization, teams can deploy and destroy test environments on demand mitigating wait times and delays associated with provisioning and configuring live test environments. This agility in resource management leads to more efficient development and software validation processes.

Reduce Capital and Operating Costs

Service virtualization reduces costs by optimizing infrastructure usage. A typical software environment consists of various components such as databases, APIs, third-party services, and legacy systems.

Traditionally, organizations would need multiple environments for development, testing, and staging, leading to increased infrastructure costs. In some cases, teams face cost constraints when testing against a dependency. Some organizations charge their integration partners for access to their cloud-based services during testing. As a result, teams may have to pay for this access, which can significantly inflate project costs.

Tools for service virtualization allow teams to create virtual replicas of these components, thereby reducing the need for multiple physical environments and enabling more efficient resource allocation.

Accelerate Time to Market

The efficiency gains from service virtualization translate to a faster time to market for applications. It allows for earlier and more comprehensive testing, identifying issues sooner in the development cycle. A notable example is the case of a Chilean bank, BCI, which cut its software testing time in half using service virtualization.

Through service virtualization, BCI achieved the following:

• More than 50% reduction in test flow cycles.
• 30% improvement in test efficiency.
• 20% acceleration of app delivery.

Check out BCI’s story and how service virtualization can speed up software testing.

Increase Quality of Software

Service virtualization plays a crucial role in the continuous integration and delivery process. By enabling more frequent and comprehensive testing throughout the development process, it helps identify and resolve issues earlier, leading to higher quality software releases.

When testing in a virtual environment, testers can also modify the behavior of virtual services to induce various failure scenarios, leading to the identification and resolution of potential issues, ultimately enhancing the overall quality of the software.

Presenting the Case for Service Virtualization

When considering the implementation of service virtualization in your organization, it’s important to follow a structured approach.

Let’s explore the key steps in presenting a compelling case for service virtualization in your organization.

1. Align to Your Organization’s Goals

The first step involves aligning the adoption of service virtualization with your organization’s overall goals. It can be an uphill battle to convince leadership and budget holders of the value of a service virtualization solution, especially if the concept of service virtualization is new to the organization.

By aligning the introduction of service virtualization with a larger or existing corporate initiative around software quality, time to market goals, or reducing project testing costs, the value of service virtualization will resonate more strongly with decision makers. To do this, you have to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that are most relevant to your organization, such as reduced time to market or improved software quality. It’s best to identify a common challenge that impacts multiple teams or projects across the enterprise, and then quantify the impact this challenge or roadblock has on project costs. From there, demonstrate how service virtualization can directly contribute to solving this challenge.

2. Identify Key and Critical Dependencies

Conduct a thorough analysis of your development and testing processes to identify the most critical dependencies. These might include third-party APIs, mainframe systems, payment gateways, databases, cloud services, and the like, that are frequently unavailable, costly, or difficult to access.

If a specific dependency is problematic for multiple teams across the enterprise, allies across multiple projects help present the business case to invest in a service virtualization solution. By providing an analysis of how much engineering time would be saved by virtualizing that specific dependency and sharing the virtual asset across various software teams, the projected ROI will increase resulting in a stronger business case for investment.

3. Scoping the Initial Impact

Many organizations select a systematic approach to adopting service virtualization in which they select one project to focus on for the initial solution implementation and then, based on success, scale service virtualization across the portfolio. This involves implementing service virtualization in a targeted manner. It’s important to focus on a project with high visibility across the organization. The project’s high visibility will help other teams see the benefits of service virtualization and understand how it addresses key challenges. This fosters a more collaborative effort to adopt and scale up service virtualization.

Once the first project has implemented the solution and is running its test automation in a virtual test environment or against virtual dependencies, the amount of time and engineering costs can be calculated to provide an ROI and benefit analysis of the solution. This initial success story can pave the way for broader adoption across the organization.

4. Use Case Presentations

The best way to start building a successful and compelling success story is to first properly scope and quantify the problem being solved. Gathering data points like the following will help down the line in building an ROI statement:

• Frequency of the targeted services going down
• Duration of testing wait times that result from the dependency being unavailable
• Number of automation failures due to environmental instability
• All the associated engineering hours spent trying to solve the problem in-house

Once service virtualization has been implemented for the project and testing is happening against the virtual service, data can be gathered to calculate the ROI and benefit analysis. After the information has been presented to stakeholders and decision-makers, it’s important to also present that data and the success story to other software projects across the organization. More people raising their hands to tell leadership that they have similar challenges will help solidify C-suite support for adopting service virtualization in a wider scope across the organization.

In addition to developing your own use cases and success stories, it can be helpful to leverage success stories from other organizations. Here are some examples.

• Large bank delivered app features 40% more efficiently through service virtualization.
• Alaska Airlines increased testing time with parallel test environments and test data management.
• Wealth management firm simplified testing with simulation and created a 100% accessible test environment, 24×7.

Leveraging success stories from other organizations can further strengthen the case for service virtualization adoption. Real-world examples like the ones above make the benefits more tangible and relatable to decision makers.

5. Address Management Concerns

You need to be proactive in addressing potential concerns from management regarding the cost or complexity of implementing service virtualization. While highlighting the long-term cost savings associated with reduced infrastructure needs and faster development cycles is powerful, it will not always address management’s concerns on how teams will be enabled with the tool to achieve success in their service virtualization initiative. This is where individual tool selection comes into play.

It’s recommended to have a list of specific requirements for the tool that can be used to evaluate service virtualization tool vendors. For instance, one item on the list might be to score the ease of use and user-friendly nature of each service virtualization tool.

It’s important to look beyond tool functionality and to the vendor itself.

• Does the vendor provide good customer support?
• What’s their typical support response time?
• Does the vendor provide training options?

Take the time to look up the vendor on sites like Gardner Peer Reviews or G2 to see what existing customers say about their use of the software and their experiences with the vendor. Here are a couple of examples:

• Parasoft Virtualize Reviews on Gartner Peer Insights
• Parasoft Virtualize Reviews on G2

Determining Business Value Indicators

When presenting and justifying the adoption of a new tool or solution to your executive team, it’s essential to consider not just the obvious costs of the problem but also the less visible ones. Here are some examples of questions to ask and answer.

• How is the issue affecting your brand?
• Is that issue leading to lost sales or a rise in support cases?
• What is the cost of the time support teams spend investigating?

These hidden impacts are crucial. By gathering and including this data in your proposal, you can effectively gain management’s support.

Demonstrate ROI

Demonstrating return on investment (ROI) is crucial when making a case for service virtualization. The ROI can be substantial, often manifesting in cost savings and productivity gains.

Cost savings come from reduced infrastructure needs, fewer production defects, and optimized resource utilization. Productivity improvements stem from faster development cycles, reduced downtime in testing, and the ability to work in parallel.

For instance, organizations have reported cutting testing time by up to 50%, accelerating time-to-market by weeks or even months. These time savings directly translate to cost savings and increased revenue opportunities.

Moreover, the improved quality resulting from more comprehensive testing can lead to higher customer satisfaction and reduced support costs. To better understand the potential ROI of a service virtualization initiative, consider using an ROI calculator. These tools can help you quantify the benefits based on your specific project and organizational factors.

Where Can Service Virtualization Take Us?

Service virtualization has the potential to take your software development endeavors to new heights. Because it enables continuous testing and parallel development, it can dramatically cut down the time to market for new features and products. Quality assurance becomes more robust as teams can test earlier and more frequently, catching issues before they escalate into costly problems.

Consider a financial services company developing a new mobile banking app that integrates with various third-party APIs, including payment gateways and credit scoring services. Some of these APIs are still under development or have limited access during certain hours. Without service virtualization, the development team would face delays, waiting for the actual services to be ready or accessible for testing.

By implementing service virtualization, the team can create virtual versions of these APIs, simulating their behavior and responses. This allows the team to continue testing and refining the app’s functionality without waiting for the real services to become available. As a result, the project stays on track, reducing time to market and ensuring a smoother integration process.

Service virtualization can also enhance an organization’s agility in responding to market changes. With virtualized services, teams can quickly prototype and test new ideas without waiting for actual services to be available or incurring additional costs. By simulating these services, the team can create a working prototype that accurately reflects how the final product will operate, enabling early feedback and iteration.

In terms of team dynamics, virtualizing your services can bring about better collaboration between development, testing, and operations teams. Providing a consistent and always-available test environment reduces conflicts and bottlenecks that often arise from shared or limited resources.

As your organization matures in its use of service virtualization, you may find new applications beyond testing, such as in customer demos, sales enablement, or even as part of your production failover strategy. How does your business stack up?