Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

Ability to virtualize webservices, MQ, JDBC

We have saved a lot in terms of the time it takes to test data setup infrastructure and turn around time for testing.

As of today, none of the Microsoft technologies are supported.

2 Years

Customer Service is swift and tries to get to the bottom of the issue. Most issues are solved within two days.

Initial set up might be a bit complex, especially when you are going with an enterprise level setup. However it is a one time effort and is very smooth afterwords.

Supports lots of middleware technologies. Good virtualization tool.

They can improve their front end testing features.

6+ years

We once faced issues when we moved from 4.2 to 4.7 or 5. They completely changed the UI and their is very little support for backward compatibility.

No.

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Good.

I like working with the CA Service Virtualization product, so I'll stick with it. Given a chance I would like to work on Parasoft and Green Hat as well.

I've been using CA Service Virtualization for the last 6 years, I am quite happy with the performance and how it developed over the years. Unlike other tools, the set up of CA Service Virtualization is quite easy and self-explanatory.

We implemented using a vendor team which was very talented.

Green Hat and Parasoft.

The features are really good in the middleware testing world. It supports lots of technologies. I would strongly recommend this tool for Automation and Virtualization. It's a good tool for QA developers.

Service Virtualization

We use CA Service Virtualization to stub out various downstream systems, it helps to reduce the environment contention with other downstream testing teams.

Load & Performance Testing. It is not as good as other tools like HP Performance Center, SilkPerformer, etc.

2 years

No issues with deployment.

No, it is pretty stable. It can handle 400tps on our server.

No, it was expanded to support multiple teams.

Customer Service:

I never contacted the customer service.

Technical Support:

I never contacted the technical support.

Yes, we previously used other solutions but switched to CA Service Virtualization because it supports more protocols. We were looking at SoupUI but it only supports web services while CA Service Virtualization supports mainframe and other protocols.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but I heard we had some issues with building SSL services initially.

In-house

The ability to virtualize test environments. This allows us to test on an environment without having to wait for time windows, thus eliminating a bottleneck in a traditional shared test system.

It eliminates bottlenecks in the test system sharing.

It is complex technology which takes a high end skillset to set up. You are very dependent on consultants from CA or a small subset of CA partners to implement CA Service Virtualization in the beginning. The training offered by CA is also not up to par. It is not realistic to expect that you can purchase CA Service Virtualization, send a couple of folks to CA training, and get yourself up an running with CA Service Virtualization environments without outside help.

I've been using CA Service Virtualization for more than three years

Yes, we had to thoroughly train and vet the engineers that we hired as CA Service Virtualization consultants. We were partners with ITKO, the original developer of CA Service Virtualization, prior to CA acquiring them. The ITKO development team worked closely with us for more than 6 months to get the team ready. Finding the right skillset was key, plus investing the time to train them properly. In the end we built a lab and the successful engineers gained experience through practice.

No, the product is very reliable.

No, the product allows for great scalability.

I would rate customer service from CA to be very low AFTER you have purchased the software. They are great before you buy, and disappear afterwards. However, I will caveat this by saying the CA Tech support for Service Virtualization is very good. Just don't expect any warm and fuzzy customer service.

We had a fairly mature testing consulting practice for more than ten years based on Mercury's platform (Quality Center, now owned by HP). We still use Quality Center extensively and have added CA Service Virtualization to our 'tool bag'. We did not purchase CA Service Virtualization as a replacement for any product we were using. We viewed CA Service Virtualization as a game changer, giving us the ability to add test environment virtualization in order to reduce test cycles for our clients.

It was very complex initially, once you have one or two people on board that gain experience setting up environments, you will eventually be self sufficient. Expect to use outside professional services for the initial implementation though. Don't let the vendor's sales people convince you to buy just the software, some training and "starter pack" services. The services and training will not be enough. A more realistic approach is to rent qualified engineers for the first project or two where you are going to leverage CA Service Virtualization. Send your own staff to training and have them work alongside the consultants for these initial projects. after a project or two, your team will become self sufficient.

Initially we learned through the vendor, which took 6 months and was expensive. The ITKO team was very good. However, many of them left CA after the acquisition. There are a couple of partners in the CA channel who are also very good.

It is hard to put a dollar figure on it. If you have multiple large development efforts and are sharing common test environments, CA Service Virtualization is a huge benefit because you don't have to schedule your testing based on when the test system is available. However, if you are a smaller shop with one development team who works serially, CA Service Virtualization is overkill.

This varies greatly across several clients. CA will offer a fairly good discount because they are motivated to sell right now. The consulting rates can be high, because the population of skilled, available CA Service Virtualization engineers is very small.

HP has it's own approach to test virtualization which we evaluated at the same time we evaluated CA Service Virtualization, but we found it to be behind in it's capability compared to CA Service Virtualization.

Work closely with a CA partner in their Service Virtualization channel to get your in house resources ramped up on CA Service Virtualization. Expect this to take time and require investment in professional services, training and mentoring.

The new version of LISA (6 and higher) has an auto generator for stubs based on WSDL, WADL, messages request-response pairs etc.

We are a reseller of this product so this isn't really relevant for me, but our customers use our stubs for deployment of their real production applications.

3 years

Deployment of stubs has been improved in the latest version and has become very easy.

Customer Service: CA is a great company who deliver great service to their customers as well as to us as a Partner.Technical Support: CA has a great technical support team who really take control of a problem until it is solved.

Setup is not too complicated. You do need to follow the course before starting to develop stubs though.

If you need stubs to help your development/testing this could be a great tool for you.

Virtualization and Functional testing.

The product made a huge impact in the market which includes many solutions which offer virtualization, performance testing, pathfinder, and functional testing. Development and testing became faster. It improved CSR and ROI's for our customers.

The product is supported by custom extension coding. On the virtualization front, RIT (IBM) supports more protocols however it's not as user friendly as CA LISA. It would be great to see a new protocol which supports legacy feature.

3 years

For Virtualization, when the file size is too large (more than 1 GB) it takes more time for deployment and some times the tool hangs. We came up with ant utility to perform the deployment.

Only if the proper system requirements are not followed.

Customer Service:

I have found that CA's customer support is good.

Technical Support:

I would rate CA's technical support with 4 out of 5 stars.

We weren't previously using another solution but after analyzing various options we directly selected CA LISA.

Setup is straightforward, you just need to follow the installation guide.

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

It's a good product, try it out.

CA Service Virtualization (Virtualize) has been used to a greater degree, and Test has been used to a certain extent. The clients I have worked for purchased CA Service Virtualization with the primary goal of virtualizing web service calls to a specific back-end functions that faced constraints (performance, availability, and/or data constraints). By using CA Service Virtualization (Virtualize), they were able to overcome the stated limitations.

In the performance test of a middleware application, we were able to run a much higher load with CA Service Virtualization which some of the real endpoints cannot handle. 

• By achieving this, you can better measure and get the performance throughputs of the System under test (SUT), as well as, narrow down the bottlenecks with a greater precision of the SUT.
• In one of the environments, we needed a 24/7 application availability, which was not realized when the middleware application was pointed to the real backend. This was due to one or more of the real backend being down on a consistent basis. Pointing to CA Service Virtualization services, this goal was almost achieved.
• Eliminating the test data constraints: When testing against various backend, sometimes you need to test with a specific test data (such as a valid Credit Card number) or your test data needs to go through a series of validations in order to get a good response from a subsequent web service request. Using CA Service Virtualization validate, this constraint is no longer an issue.

I have used this solution for a little more than 2 years now.

We had issues in the support for virtualization of JDBC connectivity. Also, using Java Agent virtualization was a maintenance overhead in an earlier version of CA Service Virtualization. I am not certain if this has been improved in the current version.

It was very straightforward.

We initially used CA consultants to extend their product to handle some of the data protocols that could not be handled out of the box. The CA consultants did help in doing the initial setup. After they were done, we were able to spread the services and increase the scope of usage on our own.

Without trying other products in the service virtualize space, I feel very comfortable working with this product. It does its job well, is not difficult to use and grasp, and the support is very good. I would definitely recommend this product!

Test - service layer component testing automation)

Virtualize - the best mocking/stubbing tool I've ever seen, allows for easier data management

With Service Virtualization being a newer concept and market, there is a lack of high quality/experienced resources available across the board for any of the tools (as of mid 2013)...with that said, a good developer can come up to speed fairly quickly with this tool.

Can't wait to see the integration w/ Shunra, Nolio and Grid Tools in the near future!