Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

There are many valuable features!

• Recording to build models, even from non-trivial sources.
• Ability to vary the responses very easily (randomize, pick-lists, etc.)
• Useful for performance testing — highly scalable and can vary response times.
• 100% flexibility by being able to change models.

We have many third-party dependencies. Situations we have to develop and test for include when they are down, or change their data, or don’t support certain conditions. This tool simulates them perfectly, but under our control to change and keep up 100%.

They can always work on usability and making simple things simple to do. This is true of every product that deals with complexity.

I have used CA Service Virtualization for nine years.

We have had no stability issues.

CA Service Virtualization provides impressive scaling abilities.

Technical support is excellent.

We had mock-up type products but they aren’t sophisticated enough.

The complexity of an install totally depends on what you are trying to virtualize. Sometimes configuring the security settings for recording is a pain but that’s not because of the product, it’s just a pain.

I don’t deal with pricing so I can’t help.

I didn’t evaluate other solutions. I was an early customer, they invented this space and delivered a great solution.

Make sure development gets involved. It’s more valuable the earlier it’s used in a dev cycle.

The most valuable feature is the ability to virtualize almost any web service which allows us to perform testing and speed up our development.

It’s helped us in a number of ways. In addition to helping with testing and development, it has also allowed us to create a training environment that allows our agents to work on the latest changes to our software almost instantly.

My fallback would be scalability.

Oddly, when my capacity folks pull stats memory and CPU both show within normal limits. My users, app administrator, however, see degradation during peak periods.

We're working with our capacity management engineers and our CA SV specialist to analyze the performance stats and recommend a temporary solutions. I'm planning to upgrade to v10 in 2017, so I'm going to insure we have h/w that supports current needs and v10 +24 months.

The solution is very stable. We have not had any issues.

Scalability is the reason I rated it as 8/10. We’re going through some challenges with scalability right now. CA is helping us to get through that.

I have used technical support and they are generally very, very good. Sometimes it takes a while to get through the queue to get to the right person, but that’s just because they’re very busy.

We were not using another solution. We were doing manual stubbing. Developers were creating their own mini-virtualizations and this tool has helped us create them.

I definitely recommend going down the path of service virtualization. The payback is almost immediate.

When selecting a vendor, I look for reliability, honesty, and price. I don't look for the cheapest, but I look for the best value. What are they offering? What does it cost to get that? Can I get a return on investment from it?

It gives us the ability to simulate and virtualize components that we don’t currently have. This is invaluable.

At the moment, we are still rolling out elements of the product. But we can already see that it gives us capabilities we haven’t had before, and we are very happy with it.

We had a complex initial setup in our environment, but CA helped us with it.

We have no issues deploying it.

So far, it has stood up really well; no issues at all with stability.

We have not gone down the scalability path yet, but hopefully next year we will when it becomes relevant.

The technical support team is very smart. We had a CA architect come to us to help jump start the operation. We were pleased because he learned our business and helped us get the solution off the ground.

We previously used a different solution. We switched because there was a gap in our testing which we needed to fill in.

Getting it working in our particular environment was complex.

We looked at HPE, but ultimately we chose CA because they were able to meet our challenges. My biggest point was to prove it in our environment. CA stepped up and did a proof of concept. It took six months and we gave them the biggest challenge and they figured it out.

My advice would be to look at the solution in detail, as it can fill a big gap in your testing. It, of course, does require tech knowledge to work, but for what it delivers, it’s worth it.

Virtualization is useful for system testing where the test applications are not integrated.

Service virtualization is beneficial as it allows system and integration testing to be done, without depending on a fully available environment. This allows continuous integration and continuous testing

Productivity has improved due to automation of system test cases.

HPE ALM integration could be better, especially for exporting/importing/reusing test cases written in an older version of CA Service Virtualization. The rework effort to update test cases is high.

I used it for two years; we have upgraded to version 8.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

N/A. v5 was end of support.

Initial setup was complex. CA SV scripting has an initial learning curve.

• High initial learning curve
• Benefits in system testing through virtualization

I use VSI, VSM, and SOA testing. I hardly use performance testing and automated GUI testing.

The tool is currently mostly focused on SOA-related and performance testing. Its GUI automation testing is not that powerful compared to other tools, such as HPE UFT, and Selenium, in terms of, particularly, object recognition, smart identification, results repository, frameworks driven, integration with test management repositories, and ETL testing.

Today, customers look for one consolidated vendor to manage licenses and best usage under TEM (Test Environment Management) services.

The following areas of the product have room for improvement: automated GUI testing, performance testing of various HTML5 applications and its recording capabilities. There are SAP, Siebel, Oracle Apps, Citrix, Remote Desktop and RTE applications that require a multi-faceted approach for sniffing the requests and preparing the scripts.

Additionally, it does not have a robust test management repository. This impacts connecting the various phases of testing life cycle.

We have stability issues when creating stubs for performance testing. It provides the internal native web server where the VSIs are hosted/deployed, which are not scalable at higher load. They should more flexible and able to use multiple application servers. Sometimes, the VSIs stop responding too.

There is a scalability issue regarding licenses. The Developer Edition should be free and only charge for the hosting licenses. There are charges even for transactions and hits also, which makes it difficult to track usage and optimization.

While basic questions are answered, it becomes difficult with tricky questions such as, is the request payload non-plain text or Java de-serialized objects, and about customizing them. When we approach support, they redirect us to professional services. We need more helpful support here.

We used SOAPUI Pro for when web services and JMS queues had to be mocked. We shifted to CA for other protocols. But customers are looking at the return on the investment they made. Convincing them becomes a challenge.

Initial setup was OK.

Licensing definitely needs more flexible models. Too many complicated parameters also makes it difficult for us to explain them to our customers. Pricing definitely is too high. Not sure if CA is aware of SOAPUI Mock Services – a free alternative. And, for Pro, it is only $120 per year. If a customer has only a Web Services context, CA should explain how to bring up that story.

We have evaluated several products more than once, starting with SOAPUI Pro, IBM RTVS (earlier Green Hat), and Parasoft Virtualize.

Service virtualization is the most valuable feature because we can create end-to-end services without actual hardware, so that saves a lot of cost and money.

We do application performance management or testing, where we have two options: Either we have to build an infrastructure end-to-end or we have to use the service virtualization capability that can mimic the actual endpoints, which makes it much easier for testing.

There is always room for improvement. Microservices are coming, and I don't know how microservices are going to be virtualized.

They still have a long way to go because service virtualization is a new area and there is a lot happening in this world. They have to keep building on their product and services for us to get it in the future. They have to adapt in more areas.

They already know what we are looking for. We asked them to support the MASL. They worked it out and then they provided us support. Other areas they can improve on are the scalability, failover capabilities, so that you don't have to depend upon a single instance of the server.

Stability’s pretty good so far. We have been using it for the last three years, so it's pretty good.

Stability’s one area that needs work; it's good, but the challenge is that scaling at a very high level is slightly problematic at this point in time. It meets our requirements so far, but I think they need to improve it.

Technical support are very proactive; we have very good support.

We did not previously use a different solution. We had a homegrown solution, and that was easy and cheaper, but the problem was maintaining that homegrown solution over a long period of time. It was quite an investment, so buying this product made sense.

When selecting a vendor, we look equally at the process and technology aspects, from end to end; what are the services they can provide.

My team did the initial setup, and it's pretty straightforward.

I don't want to disclose which vendors were on the short list, but there were a couple of vendors, and we found out that those products were not mature enough.

Web service virtualization solution: It’s cost effective over a period of time and provides flexibility in product validation in the SOA space.

Specifically, service virtualization has reduced infrastructure costs by close to 40%. It helps in early problem detection and early fix, leading to early product release.

It would be great to have improved logging for trace requests and responses at the virtualized service level. The existing feature needs improving.

I have used this solution for nearly four years.

I have noticed performance issues such as the virtual server requires a restart after using it for a certain amount of time, to make sure it responds better.

Technical support is 8/10.

I had only used SoapUI before. LISA has better built-in capabilities that reduce the need for scripting/coding. Also, modeling is appealing and easily understandable.

Initial setup for service testing was easy, but setup of virtualization server was bit complex and needed help from an expert.

We built it in house. It was bit complex in the beginning but we gradually understood the setup better and are comfortable with it now.

My personal feeling is that the licensing cost keeps smaller organisations away due to affordability, but bigger organisations can afford it easily. However, an important point is that over time, there is a good ROI, given that tool is integrated well for virtualization of provider systems.

My personal opinion is that the tool is really good as a service virtualization solution rather than a service testing tool.

We were using this product for service virtualization, and SoapUI/REST API testing for the US’s largest retail customer in the home improvement space.

For service virtualization, we had a lot of subsystems in our application; and we had lot of dependencies on the downstream applications. We extensively used service virtualization to reduce these dependencies, which could be due to readiness, or downstream applications having downtime. We also had few third-party subsystems whose technical support was not available during US night hours. This resulted in a complete loss of the offshore effort in India. This was hampering our release dates, which are very critical in the retail business. Missing a release has a directly proportional impact on revenue.

For web services testing (SoapUI/Rest API), we initially had our web services test cases automated using a custom built Groovy/Selenium/SoapUI framework. Though the framework was robust, it was difficult for us to maintain the automation scripts. When our customer bought CA Service Virtualization, we were able to move our 3000+ automation scripts to Service Virtualization scripts within 6 months while supporting new features and producing regular releases. This was commendable.

Training our folks on Service Virtualization was also pretty easy. We hired three Service Virtualization experts from the market, and were able to build a team of 14 Service Virtualization experts within three to four months. CA Service Virtualization is a very robust product and is highly configurable. This helped us to take more user stories, compared to the days when we were using our home grown framework.

To the best of my knowledge (and memory), listed below are the few challenges we were facing at that time. It could be possible that CA would have already addressed a few of these limitations and short falls.

• Simultaneous execution of automation scripts was not possible; or, at least, not readily available. We had to write some wrappers to handle this situation.
• Integration with Jenkins was not available. We had to write small utilities to achieve this.
• Integration with JIRA was not available to automatically log a defect if there were script failures.
• It consumes more memory and makes the system very slow, which was stopping simultaneous execution.

I have used this solution for more than two years.

As mentioned in the room for improvement section.

I don’t remember any issues as such, apart from the ones mentioned in the room for improvement section.

As I mentioned, we were using a home grown Groovy/Selenium/SoapUI framework. Once a customer bought the CA Service Virtualization license, we were forced to use this. However, we found the product to be more robust than our framework.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward in terms of installation and configuration. Later, as we encountered a few challenges, we built a couple of utilities.

It is pretty expensive. On the licensing part, we don’t have much insight because the customer was handling this part.

We had evaluated multiple frameworks because we were working in a multi-vendor scenario. Every vendor brought their frameworks and solutions to the table. I don’t know if the customer evaluated any other commercial products. A few of our team members had already worked on iTKO/Service Virtualization on other projects; and they provided good feedback on the product.

I would recommend this product for clients who are heavy on web services. This product is very easy to learn, implement, and configure.