Leading Telecom Company Solves Performance Issues With Service Virtualization

The Challenges

The telecommunications company faced many critical software development and testing challenges.

• Inability to efficiently conduct performance tests on the mobile network due to integration with third-party services that did not scale to capacity and contributed to high testing costs.
• Challenges with internal web services and limited availability of the lab environment for the mobile network’s proactive service alerts application.
• Working with complex and sensitive test data, like Social Security numbers, credit cards, names, phones, and email, made performance testing in a live environment extremely complex, necessitating a virtual substitute.
• Syncing data across all test environment components to support end-to-end test scenarios.

The Approach

To address these challenges, the business turned to Parasoft to implement service virtualization, which simulates the behavior of third-party APIs like Experian and ID Analytics.

Teams used virtual proxies to record and play back test data from live services.

“We’ve been able to replicate over 40 services by setting up virtualized versions instead of hitting the real service, which gives us the ability to continue testing even when that service is unavailable.”

—Senior director of IT, BA/Testing/Release at the telecommunications company

They could also control traffic flow by toggling between live and virtual. The company used Parasoft’s leading CRUD tools to dynamically, store, read, and update data to support realistic end-to-end test scenarios. By leveraging virtual endpoints and data, the teams can focus their testing efforts on internally developed mobile components.

The Solution

The company implemented service virtualization using Parasoft Virtualize for functional and nonfunctional testing.

“By leveraging Parasoft Virtualize, we were able to build virtual services with hybrid response modes, combining virtual and real services based on matching conditions. This flexibility enabled us to test complex and sensitive scenarios, such as specific credit scores or past debts, to ensure our transactions met the Service Level Agreements (SLAs).”

—Senior director of IT, BA/Testing/Release at the telecommunications company

Parasoft Virtualize enabled the teams to create virtual data and services. They leveraged Parasoft CTP to capture key response metrics and hit statistics. By identifying and remediating performance bottlenecks in application code, the team overcame scalability challenges of proactive service alerts. They also replaced third-party and internal systems at a fraction of the cost.

The Results

Parasoft enabled the company to meet its overarching goal of delivering high-quality software to its customers. Adopting Parasoft Virtualize resulted in numerous benefits for the company.

• Increased test coverage. Service virtualization enabled the company to expand its test coverage by over 20% in mobile applications. Parasoft Virtualize provided flexibility to create diverse test scenarios and helped the team meet internal code coverage requirements.
• Prevented test data costs. With Parasoft Virtualize, the company is saving tens of thousands of dollars annually by avoiding direct testing against expensive third-party applications.
• Reduced costs. The company saved an additional $7,600 annually by adopting virtual services for test data setup, eliminating the need to buy and maintain additional real devices and lab spaces.
• Resilient testing. The company replicated over 40 complex services through virtualization, which enabled testing continuity even when real services were unavailable.
• Improved performance testing efficiency. Parasoft Virtualize allowed the company to test complex data scenarios, simulate natural disaster scenarios, and overcome scaling limitations of third-party systems for performance testing.