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Feature Friday – How Does Service Virtualization Help in Software Testing?
As the seasons turn there is one thing Chicago natives love is events. A lively city constantly buzzing with farmer’s markets, plant shows, block parties, and music festivals, Chicago natives enjoy the lively summers discovering the city as they go. But just like any parade there is always a chance of rain. Any number of things could go wrong including the weather, picking a noisy and isolated location, among a range of other things mitigating the desired flood of happy faces.
The same problem can be found throughout application development. With respect to application success, a range of indicators can inhibit usage and ultimately client retention. This week’s feature Friday is brought to you by Tim and Vishal who discuss service virtualization, a feature that mitigates developmental bottlenecks and allows the testing of application functionality when certain resources are missing.
Tell us more about service virtualization offered by Qyrus, their use cases, and impact on testing and QA processes?
Tim:
Service Virtualization is a feature that allows users to virtualize assets that may be required for testing, whether that be in an API test or an API requirement within an end-to-end business process. You can tailor the virtualized asset to be a variety of different API methods and set up multiple request/response pairs to a single API call.
Vishal:
Specifically, service virtualization handles the issue of waiting for unattainable or incomplete API assets before continuing with certain testing. It can cause a hassle, slowing down the testing process ultimately impacting the entire QA and deployment cycle. If speed to market and quality are essential, any time waiting is time wasted.
This is a feature that truly promotes a shift left, we decided to further investigate just how impactful it can be and if used across the testing industry today.
What is service virtualization’s overall impact on the testing process?
Vishal:
Functional testing components may be unavailable for a range of reasons including security, performance, maintenance, and development. A virtualized asset of the required component to be tested can be more than enough to get the testing started. For example, you might need to test a geo-location functionality in your component that in turn uses a 3rd party payment APIs. Instead of using the payment APIs, you could use a mock that would return known results to your component. This helps you validate that the results from your component are returned correctly. An added benefit is that you keep your usage of external APIs to a minimum.
Tim:
Service virtualization can also be used to make sure that your component or system under test behaves correctly in regards to performance, SLAs, security, etc. For example, you might want to make sure that if you get an error from your back-end system that it will be logged correctly, or that your component gracefully handles situations like when a 3rd party API stops responding during a load test, etc.
Does the same or similar functionality exist without Qyrus, and how do competitors address similar problems?
Vishal:
Some competitors offer similar asset virtualization solutions. Some might just refer them to mock APIs or mock servers, which contain similar capabilities of building out and simulating API responses.
Tim:
But what makes Qyrus unique is that Qyrus provides 2 approaches for virtualization. The manual approach allows users to create Mock API with Java, Python, or a similar technology, yielding desired, static Responses every time. Qyrus also offers a dynamic approach – where users can generate real-time data, using dynamic APIs, while implementing them across test scripts.
A unique feature with a range of possibilities, we wanted to figure out just how targeted this feature can get across an organization’s personas. After all, a feature is only as relevant as its usage and functionality!
How might service virtualization help testers, developers, and business technologists? What value can they bring?
Vishal:
Developers are always working on writing code that requires APIs and integration with other system components via APIs. It might not always be desirable or even possible to actually access those systems during development. This is where mocking comes in. Instead of developing code with actual external dependencies in place, a mock of those dependencies is created and used instead. Depending on your development requirements, this mock is made “intelligent” enough to allow you to make the calls you need and get similar results back as you would from the actual component, thus enabling a seamless development and delivery process.
Tim:
Business analysts often like to use and validate applications before they become available to consumers. before they can try them out and commit to using them. In this case, a complete simulation of the API can be provided, online or as a distributive for local deployment. The consumer can try out API from their system, and make basic requirement assessments without imposing any cost on the actual API. With proper Swagger documentation – a business analyst can even mock an entire service with a few clicks!
Vishal:
We often find testers taking API and application functionality testing to a new level. With the ability to mock certain responses and functionalities testers can simulate a range of different edge cases and unique test cases. In doing so we often find testers tying up loose end with application functionality and finding inconsistencies that may have been otherwise overlooked.
To end, we bugged our experts’ brains to figure out exactly how the implantation and usage of this feature promotes regular, daily, value. A consistent feature that can provide daily value is integral to business processes.
How do you see service virtualization impacting day-to-day operations across organizations?
Tim:
Service virtualization is a comprehensive feature that can be implemented for a range of benefits. Primarily, using service virtualization, otherwise unattainable assets no longer create bottlenecks in development and testing. Testing is no longer limited to the speed of development allowing for better quality applications and competitive release times.
Vishal:
Furthermore, expanding testing capabilities and use cases allows for broader testing coverage and testing sooner within the development process. This enables a steadfast testing and QA process led by automation, directly promoting quality and efficiency across organizations, every day.
In conclusion, we can see how powerful service virtualization on Qyrus can be. It’s a very useful feature and can help multiple different kinds of users. That’s it for this Feature Friday. Join us next week as we discuss parameterization on Qyrus and data driven testing!
