ALM Best Practices

Agile Quality Tip #8 - Reduce End-to-End Test Complexity with Service Virtualization

  

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As we wrote previously, our current series of posts is covering 10 brief quality tips designed to help you extend well-known agile quality practices to ensure that your software satisfies business needs—effectively and efficiently.

Tip #8 is " Reduce End-to-End Testing Complexity."

Agile teams commonly work on distributed heterogeneous applications (e.g., SOA, Web, Cloud) where one or more component is incomplete, evolving, unstable, inaccessible, or otherwise unavailable for testing. Agile methodologies call for continuous and automated (when possible) regression testing, but how can you run automated end-to-end functional tests nightly when parts of the system under test are not readily available? If you delay testing until everything is ready and available for testing, you risk slipping into a waterfall-like paradigm.

One way to tackle this challenge is to emulate the behavior of the necessary components. Essentially, you construct and deploy virtualized assets that emulate (virtualize) application behavior, performance, and data. This is achieved by applying a concept known as Service Virtualization.

Service Virtualization was conceived to emulate the behavior of unavailable and evolving web services, then evolved beyond the canonical service protocols to support multiple message types and protocols—JDBC, MQ, JMS, and more.  This extended service virtualization radically reduces the configuration time, hardware overhead, and data management efforts involved in standing up and managing a realistic and sustainable dev/test environment.

The ideal service virtualization should aim for virtualized assets that can:

• Replace the various endpoints in the system architecture (services, applications, mainframes, stored procedures, etc.) as well as emulate the application behavior at the unit level.
• Be added to the test environment to replace the behavior of various components that would otherwise inhibit your team’s ability to effectively exercise and validate the end-to-end business process.
• Be managed and shared in a team environment, and easily rolled out between shared servers and user desktops. Business data used by the virtualized assets can be easily maintained with spreadsheets or various other data sources.

With such virtualized assets, you can replace dependent systems, methods, or components that would otherwise inhibit the team's ability to effectively validate the requirements that need to be tested or to verify that detected problems have been effectively resolved.

For instance, consider a services-based account provisioning system that’s losing orders. To solve this problem, the development team has to test the fixed application in a safe sandbox that emulates the transaction flows of the production environment—or risk breaking the system upon redeploying the application. Using emulation, the team can exercise their services in context, without impacting partners' normal business transactions.

This concept isn't new, but it's becoming increasingly important as enterprise systems continue to become more distributed and heterogeneous. Moreover, this increased complexity makes it necessary to expand the concept of emulation to extend beyond services and also include other essential system components—for example, the database, the Web interface, the broker, and so forth—and to be able to emulate the various protocols that commonly co-exist across such systems.

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Want to learn more about how to reduce end-to-end testing complexity? Read Eliminate Testing Roadblocks for SOA/Composite Applications. This eBook explains how to exercise end-to-end transactions involving system components that are unavailable, evolving, or difficult-to-access.