The quest to deliver a world-class user experience has made softwares a lot more complex and intertwined today. There is, evidently, a greater dependency on third–party APIs and, indeed, there are development hold ups that run according to priorities.
In this complex and phased outlook of software release, the testing team has a lot to bear with alongside coping with the stress of delayed delivery. This delay shapes up from the late handover of the ready features. Yet, the buck stops at the testing team. Fair or not, the practice is too common and challenging. Well! Maybe not anymore.
Heard of Service Virtualization? This tool comes to the rescue of Quality Engineering teams and promises to revolutionize the speed, accuracy and performance for overall engineering teams. QAs, included and benefited the most!
Service virtualization allows teams to work on parallel projects. It effectively integrates testing from the very beginning of the application development. Software testing professionals widely acknowledge service virtualization’s ability to shift testing processes to the left. Simulations allow you to eliminate constraints, thereby ensuring that crucial aspects are thoroughly tested as early as possible.
The process yields significant benefits in terms of reducing the risk, as well as determining the cost of setting up a testing environment and accelerating the time to market.
Shift-left Testing Empowered by Service Virtualization
It is better to detect the problem in the initial stage so that they later don’t become a headache. This is what shifting testing left in DevOps does. It automates testing from the start thus improving the frequency. In other words, with shift-left testing instead of smearing problems so late, teams find them prematurely, and most times, prevent them from occurring at all.
Considering they deliver better products faster and save you money, this looks great on paper. However, a test that is conducted earlier and more repeatedly can be burdened with dependencies, making it difficult to accomplish. In this case, service virtualization can help remove dependencies by affecting the behavior of missing or difficult-to-access components while testing.
Compelling Perks of Service Virtualization with Shift-Left
As part of service virtualization, simulations of needed systems are created and made available through the software development lifecycle, removing constraints. Developers, testers, and performance engineers collaborate on projects simultaneously. As a result, innovative new software applications are delivered faster, cost-effectively, and of higher quality.
Shift left testing includes integrating testing activities at the very beginning of the SDLC as opposed to traditional testing methods. To execute this, project work is moved to the left. Service virtualization aims to provide quality products to end-users. Moving left with service virtualization will have significant ramifications for testing and development, some are mentioned below.
- Massive reduction in the cost of testing and development
Errors and bugs are cheaper to fix when caught early. They become more complex and expensive as time goes on. The more often you test, the easier it becomes to find errors and fix them. It would be extremely time-consuming and expensive to do the same thing over and over. Sixty-seven percent of companies’ costs have been reduced due to service virtualization.
- Face the rising competition with an edge
By accelerating the time to market, ‘Shift Left’ gives your team a competitive edge. Additionally, virtualizing the service allows users to test the behavior of connected components in a demo environment, rather than in a real-world one, thus saving time. To entice the end-users, you need to rush your product out the door to compete with the rising competition.
- Automation level at an increasing pace
Automation levels can be increased using shift-left, reducing the potential human errors and maximizing test coverage by running more test cases simultaneously. Furthermore, it will prevent the problems caused by the production. Testing will be more feasible because testers don’t have to wait for configuration.
- Enhance efficiency to overcome challenging tasks
Overcoming the challenges is the most important part of testing and with shift left using service virtualization you can sail through it easily. With it the performance can be monitored, the quality of code can be checked, and the testers are free to focus on more challenging and challenging tasks. In addition, you can utilize built-in security checks with service virtualization.
- Developers are at ease
Service virtualization has the biggest advantage of reducing the testing time from five to six weeks to two or three days. With the available virtual assets, developers can test their data set. Before releasing the software to a testing environment, it allows the developers to complete comprehensive tasks.
Future of Service Virtualization
Providing flexible and scalable solutions has become the new paradigm for IT companies, as digital and instant gratification is on the rise. Software teams come across roadblocks when they need to test APIs, 3rd party applications, databases, mainframes, cloud servers, networks, and more. This can cause uncertainties that lead to missed production deadlines, which can be eye-water expensive. As a result of service virtualization, your development team can move their testing left and embrace more agile methods as they imitate these missing or hard-to-test components.
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Written by Infiwave Solutions