Companies may be shifting testing left, but lack of access to internal services as well as external services can delay testing and cause unnecessary bottlenecks.

According to the Sogeti 2019 Continuous Testing report, test environments are one of the biggest bottlenecks to achieving continuous testing. The survey results reveal the inordinate amount of time that organizations spend on test environment management as well as some of the key challenges in this area.

Time came up as a key issue when respondents were asked about – “test environment-related challenges that impeded efforts to improve the software development lifecycle (SDLC).” Participants gave the highest weighting to “wait times and cost for environment provisioning” (36% of respondents) and “complexity of needed applications” (36%), followed by “inability to identify defects early in the testing process” (33%).

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Facing the challenges of continuous testing

This is where service virtualization can come in.

Service virtualization (SV) simulates or “mocks” unavailable systems by emulating their dynamic behavior, data, and performance. This means that teams can work in parallel for faster delivery. 

Mock services or service virtualization are critical for when the application or module you are developing and testing is dependent on the other services or systems regardless whether external or internal. Such dependencies could cause major testing bottlenecks, as they may not be easily available when you need them, or they may have constraints like costs or limited control over data it returns.

Mock services remove these dependencies and also help to control the behavior of the dependencies by simulating the service using the endpoint provisioned by you – and this moves your testing to the next level. You can read this blog post on the benefits and concepts behind Mock services and service virtualization concept in general.

The Sogeti report continues, “We have also seen a few positive developments in terms of the adoption of virtualization, containerization, and tool-based automation. These trends are likely to strengthen in the future as organizations realize that virtualization and containerization are absolutely necessary to meet the demands of Agile and DevOps on a limited budget. The next two to three years are also likely to see organizations opting for increased levels of automation, particularly for solutions that automatically tell them about the impact that changes in functional requirements will have on test cases.”

Service virtualization shifts left 
As continuous testing becomes the norm for successful application delivery, service virtualization is shifting left and becoming more available to developers who want to test earlier in the testing cycle. 

Rather than waiting for the end of the testing cycle, and relying on service virtualization as a pre-production only tool, SV has become democratized, with developers creating mock environments for smaller unit tests, throughout the SDLC.

Tools like WireMock and CodeSV can help developers to create mock services so they are not reliant on enterprise service virtualization support, and users can even integrate enterprise service virtualization capabilities with BlazeMeter, so that developers across all teams can create virtual services to test faster and more effectively. 

Sign up for our webinar here to learn more about service virtualization and how it can help you test faster, and with less bottlenecks in 2020.

 

Content provided by SD Times and Broadcom.