Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

Service visualization for almost all types of protocols. Version 7.5.1 has many improved features compared to version 6.5 which we were previously using.

Has lead to cost savings and helped improve the project life cycle. Teams are more streamlined and helpful not only for testers but even for developers.

It's not really meant for Services Testing and reporting functionality from the CA SV console - it's a very basic one. I'd like to see improvements in these two areas.

6 Months

I have not experienced any deployment issues. The deployment process is really simple and straight forward. It certainly has improved in the latest version.

Not really, sometimes we face minor issues with the registry server but that is more of an environment issue. Other than that we didn't encounter any issues with stability.

Right now we're only using it for pre-production, so we haven't yet seen how it scales if we use it for production volumes.

I'm very satisfied with the tool CA has produced and the level of support they provide. I'm only a bit disappointed with the knowledge repository.

8 out of 10. Most of the issues I raised with CA support were addressed within 24 hours. Also, CA actively follows up on the open issues - I've found this to be very good.

I used SOAP UI briefly. I switched to CA SV as it has more advanced features, supports almost all types of services and moreover has better support.

I'm not aware of any issues we faced during the implementation. We have a separate environments team which did the setup for us.

We implemented through an in-house team working with the parent company. However, our environment support team actively monitors all the servers.

It really depends on various factors like the type of project and timeline of the project. Definitely ROI is a lot better then earlier projects when we didn't use virtual services.

Initial setup was done by the parent company and we are just using licenses and servers provided by the parent company.

We analyzed the tools on the market including: HP, IBM Green Hat and CA SV. Each product has its own merits but we found that CA SV is more mature and matches our requirements best so we selected it for our service virtualization needs.

Very easy to learn and implement. Doesn't require extensive technical knowledge. Use virtual services instead of stubbed data.

It has helped manual and performance testing teams to complete their testing ahead of schedule.

Reporting needs to be improved for both manual and performance testing.

I've been using it for 46 months, and am currently working on setting up an environment for v8.

There were a few issues during deployment because of missing jar files.

There were issues with the older versions, until v6.1.

No issues encountered.

Very good, 8/10.

Very good, 8/10.

No previous solution was used.

It's straightforward, just follow the user manual provided on the CA website.

We implemented it in-house.

Clients were able to save $700k and three million GBP in the first year of using the solution.

It took us 14 man days to set up.

No other options were considered.

Easy to implement with lot of built-in features.

Web service, MQ and IMS virtualization. The tool has many built in filters and assertions which helped us create better virtual services.

Due to the virtual services, the overall release cycle became shorter and it also saved us a lot of money.

IMS services in version 7.5.2 are quite unstable.

Also, the Javascript step doesn't support all Java methods.

6 months

We didn't encounter any issues with deployment.

We didn't find any issues with stability either.

Sometimes during load testing even though we have enough space on the server, CA SV is not able to handle higher loads. (We are still working on this issue. Root cause has not yet been identified.)

Customer service is good.

It's good but CA doesn't support custom extensions so we did not get much support on IMS services issues we have.

• Service Virtualization
• Web Service/MQ/Database Testing
• Selenium Integration
• Junit Integration
• ALM + Dev Test
• and a long list of other features.

We have saved a lot of money and testing time by using CA SV. We started with Web Services and we've now covered all Mainframe, DB, MQ.

4 years

No issues with deployment.

When starting we had issue like LISA getting stuck while we were reading csv files doing performance testing.

No issues with scalability.

9/10. And we love the community.

9/10

I've worked on RIT also. It's not that easy to use and lots of things are missing. But CA SV makes it so easy. It's three steps to create the virtual service and deploy.

Initial setup was straightforward. Read the agreement and close your eyes, next... next...

In-house

I'm looking forward to testing Devtest 8.0.2 and the new ideas. I've been impressed so far.

The CAI aka Pathfinder is a great capability and will help the organization to achieve SV goals and expand the SV to different systems without many firewall changes or changes in the existing environment setup.

The financial industries have tight firewall security where introducing a new product among their existing infrastructure is not a hot cake or getting new MQs created for SV. At high-Level CAI looks like any agent-broker architecture but it does a lot in terms of Virtualization and Application Delivery Lifecycle where Dev or QA do not need to worry and do not need to depend on the environment teams to get the systems logs for triage or fix it.

Finally, last but not least CAI can also help the architects/designers to understand/generate the application flow diagram and analyse any abnormal behaviour.

The major ones for our organization are MQ and SOA Middleware.

We had a lot of dependency on MQ message, where CAI helped to get the MQ details and create VS out of it.

I feel a few areas can be improved, but I'm not sure if CA has already fixed these in the latest version:

1. Agents for different systems. I am not sure if existing agents can support all types of servers or systems.

2. Along with application details, can we capture network details to simulate network behavior?

3. Can we separate utility to monitor the CAI details rather than the portal, because Portal is accessible to all.

More Than 2 years now.

Yes, we had issues when we deployed into Oracle WebLogic server. .

I'd say 8 out of 10. Service is great in terms of community forms, pulse etc.

Technical documentation needs some more improvements by explaining live scenarios.

The technical support team we had for our engagement was really great, we are able to reach them and get everything done on time.

For SV no. We have not switched from any other solution, we started with LISA. The main factors why we decided to go with this tool was the capability towards virtualization and protocols supported.

It was not simple nor was is complex. To set up CA DevTest, you should know the tool and architecture very well along with his installation skills on the particular server you choose - like Unix or Linux. Firewalls and other areas are also very important.

We haven't yet measured ROI with the current implementation.

The tool was evaluated by an architect team. Yes, they had compared it with some competitive vendors such as HP and then purchased the CA license.

I'd like to see more features integrate with the CICD pipeline via APIs or command line etc.

I'd also like better ocumentation on live scenarios with more examples etc. as mentioned earlier.

• It supports virtualization for different combinations of transport and data protocols.

• It's easy to script for protocols that CA SV doesn't provide out of the box because it provides various ways to do so. Either by using scriptable data protocol, custom Javascript step or the CA SV SDK feature. CA provides a platform to use existing plus extended features all together.
• CA SV SDK, fllexibility to extend the tool.

• One stop solution to remove constraints. It supports most of the protocols used by different industries and they provide support to develop in scenarios where there is an exception.
• Having this tool as part of the organization gives thought to how individuals can efficiently remove dependencies and reduce time to market.

• VSE Console should be more user friendly.
• Versioning of Virtual Services as well as Projects.

2.5 years

No, but I have tried exploring IBM and HP tools but found that the ease of use, maturity and user friendliness of CA SV can't be compared.

Pathfinder, VS Easy

Ability to implement WSDL validations in the model using the built-in assertions.

The virtual services for Stress, Volume and Performance testing for applications which reduced the cost and also eliminated the dependencies of other applications and third party software.

Not all protocols are supported, but I've heard there will be a feature in version 8 with the help of which we can create models for those scenarios as well (surely a few limitations will exist).

3+

Sometimes, different versions of tools differ in behavior and new versions don't completely provide backwards compatibility.

Example: lack of ability to deploy a service built in LISA 7 to LISA 6 VSE using LISA 7 workstation.

When creating services with database steps, if the DB goes down the services will end and once the DB is up the services will be still be in an ended state, and a manual start will be required.

Triggering multiple requests sometimes increases the response time even though loadbalancers are used.

Customer service is very good.

Good.

We were using LISA 6, THEN upgraded to LISA 7.5 as the new features were beneficial for meeting business requirements.

Initial setup for Workstation is straightforward although setting an agent and broker for pathfinder to use recording is bit complex.

We implemented through a vendor team.

We have eliminated the complete dependency for all the backend systems for SVP (Stress,Volume and Performance). Testing using Service Virtualization saved huge amounts. Using service virtualization we have implemented a shift left concept to enable different teams to work in parallel instead of waiting for other teams to start the work, this also reduced the overall budget for the program.

A few other options were considered from Parasoft, HP and IBM.

Quick setup of virtual services

Creation of virtual services by simply providing XML request/response pairs

We have used service virtualization to quickly spin up training environments. Recently, our dev teams have started using service virtualization to improve the times of the Continuous Integration Testing (CI). Using service virtualization has reduced the time for each CI cycle from 4 - 5 hours to under 1 hour. This allows many more CI cycles to be executed per day and per sprint allowing quicker time to finding bugs, as well as faster times to promotion of builds to the test environments.

VSEasy is a nice feature but it needs to have some catches added to it to keep from inadvertently overwriting someone else's virtual service.

3+ years

No issues with deployment.

No issues with stability.

There was a memory leak in LISA 7.0.3 that would eventually require the rebooting of the memory to free back up the available memory. I have not yet been able to test DevTest 8.01 at that level to see if the memory leak still exists.

CA Support has been great for me!

Very good!