The Value of Service Virtualization for Agile and DevOps Teams
In our current software development and testing landscape, it’s critical to pinpoint and eliminate as many bottlenecks as humanly possible. If there’s something along your regular development lifecycle that can be tweaked or moved around for the sake of greater speed and better quality, it’s a no-brainer to make that move.
If you’re looking to remove these constraints, service virtualization should be high up on your list of things to take advantage of in 2017. The idea is to give both developers and testers the ability to create simulated services of production environments (instead of waiting around for the real thing) to develop and test. And that’s invaluable.
Why? If you’re part of a team that follows agile or DevOps principles, delivering applications and updates as quickly as possible is one of your core tenets. Service virtualization gives teams the option of testing different aspects of an application earlier, without sacrificing any of the quality.
Adam Auerbach, the senior director of technology for advanced testing and release services for Capital One Financial Corporation, recently spoke to StickyMinds about why service virtualization is one of the most important and consistently successful trends in software.
“If you have problems where you're waiting for teams to deliver something in order for you to be able to test, if you have constraints around test data, if you have constraints around the non-prod environments, all those things can be solved with service virtualization,” Auerbach explained in the interview. “Being able to create smart stubs to isolate your components and eliminate those constraints are a huge enabler in order to get to continuous testing and eventually continuous delivery. I can't talk about service virtualization enough.”
There’s just less waiting around for other pieces and parts of your team to hit their milestones. Testers and developers can work at their own speed, which Auerbach continued to highlight through real examples.
“If you have a team that's doing front end work, now they're waiting a sprint for the API team to get done and then when that gets done, you have 30 percent defects,” he continued. “Even though the team has moved onto something else, they get pulled back to do this work and then it doesn't go out here and it still doesn't work. If I had service virtualization, it would be done in the first sprint, they're able to move on, the API team would be done, and then it would be in production and you would have saved yourself time.”
We need to get faster while delivering bigger and better products. If you’re an agile team, service virtualization is an invaluable tool for hitting all your marks.
