Broadcom Service Virtualization Reviews

It is introducing a lot more flexibility for us. It reduces time scales, getting time to market. It also helps us cross-skill some of the people, and start to really bring that DevOps mentality into the bank.

I suppose in our payments estate in the bank, it's key to us. Anything that we need to put through to payments, regulatory, industry-leading, that kind of thing, we need to get there quicker. It's expensive to maintain those complex systems. Virtualization gives you the opportunity to do that a lot cheaper. We can stand up those versions of it, rather than build the humongous end-to-end environments that they always require. It's helping drive that testing down to being a lot leaner.

It's time to market of course, and also the total cost of ownership. We don't have to build big end-to-end environments anymore. Previously, any major project would come along and say, "I need to build more kit," and you just keep filling data centers. You just can't sustain that. It's expensive to maintain, and we don't always close those down; so someone's paying to keep the lights on.

Whereas with SV, we can negate some of that, and actually just build them up against the virtual service. You still use the end-to-end environments at the end of the day for your site testing, but it means that actually we can get through the primary parts of it a lot quicker. It's good.

I think the ones we've wanted have come through, actually. Because ours was such an old version, and we said at the time, "We'd like to see x, y, and zed". They're already in 9, and what I've seen of version 10, it's even more closely bundled with some of the other offerings as well. From what we saw, the biggest challenge we had at the time was that it didn't link in well with the repository, but it's now there. It's now got the open interfaces to get hold of the other stuff that it works closely with. Once we get the upgrade nailed, we'll probably get more benefit out of it.

I think for future versions, CA need to help customers get to an app store mentality where, when it comes to upgrades, I shouldn't have to go through a whole loop again every time I want to upgrade. If I tick a box, push it out to me. That's what I'd like to see. I'm sure they're probably working on that in some way, somewhere, but that would help me as a customer. For small customers, it's probably a lot easier if you've only got a few servers to upgrade. I've got 35 different servers for SV. I've got 800 people who downloaded it and are using it. It's a big user base, so to actually plan and implement the upgrade is a mammoth task in itself. Anything that would help me do that better next time would be a big positive for me.

We have had no issues with stability. It's been absolutely rock. It really has. When we scaled it, it's done everything we asked of it. We know the limitations: it doesn't always have the built in protocol handlers out-of-the-box, and you can't expect it to do every single one. We've had support from CA to build them. They came and helped us write some. As long as they're aware, they'll reach out and help us out. That's really great.

We have had no issues with the scalability. We've scaled it probably bigger than most customers, to be honest. The biggest challenge I've had is upgrading. We're on a pretty old version. It is a big leap. It takes a lot of effort to upgrade to the next one. Versions 8, 9, and beyond, I'm told are very easy to upgrade to. We're on 7, 7.5. It has taken a lot of time and effort for me to get off that version and onto a support base that I can take. That's the biggest challenge I have.

We do use technical support. I've got a good relationship manager. We probably only have one or two tickets open every month. We manage most of those things internally. We've got that capability there now, but technical issues coming through to CA? Yeah, we use it and then we got good service from them.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because of time scaling costs. Testing environments were just becoming more complex. We were having to quote ridiculous amounts of money to build more and more end-to-end environments. The challenge was that every project wanted to have their own. They wouldn't share. "Why should I share? Why don't you share?"

With SV, the whole idea is that you can have your own version, I don't care what you do with it. I can spin up as many versions as you need, very quickly, cost-effectively. Beforehand it was, you can only sustain the growth of bigger end-to-end environments to a certain extent before you say, "Sorry, there's no room left." You can't say that to the business. The business needs to change, so you have to find an alternative way.

It should have been straightforward, and it could have been better. I've given this feedback a couple of times previously. The focus is on getting the technology in, but it's less focus on the how do I change my organization to adopt the software? I think from other feedback I've heard, a lot of people have the same thing. It's not the, what it can do; it's the, how do I make it work in my organization? We had to focus a bit more on that. Once CA heard that message, I got all the support I needed, but it wasn't there as part of the service delivery for bringing it in. There are things on both sides.

I think it was just CA Service Virtualization we were evaluating at the time. We were looking at the IBM service virtualization offering, and I think Parasoft was in there as well. It just came down to this: it was the best offering for us at the time.

I need a vendor to understand my business and be proactive in telling me how they can help me with my business, rather than just being a vendor. You've got to be more than a vendor these days to stand out above the others.

Get the right level of buy-in from your organization. Understand how to get people to adopt it, rather than focusing on what it does because the "what", everybody gets. Everybody knows what it does and how it can benefit you. It's making sure you've understood your organization and how you've got to convince people to change and adopt it. It's a whole new journey on how to get new tools into a company. It could be SV. It could be anything. That was a big learning curve for us. We didn't get the right people on board to buy into it. It's just beating your head against the wall internally to try and make change. You couldn't understand why anybody else wouldn't want it? I get it now. Convincing others was the biggest challenge I had.

The keys feature of this product are:

• Workstation, where we can perform web service virtualization. That is primarily our focus, to enable the development and testing team.
• We are creating mocking and stopping for service virtualization.
• We are moving shift-left, meaning to carry out testing on the back-end which is not available. That's the main feature for this product.

My organization is looking at CA Agile, where this solution is available for the development and testing teams to enable their testing and provide a bug-free code.

We want to see more automation; an automated way of creating service virtualization without using the tool. That's the feature that we would like to see in the next release.

It is stable. We are using it in the Windows environment, so most of the time it's stable.

The product is scalable.

I would give the technical support a 50-50 rating, the reason being, for some of the custom solutions we have to depend on the tool. Thus, we have to enable and engage them for that implementation.

We didn’t have a previous solution for service virtualization. This is our first solution; we directly implemented it.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I would advise others who are looking for a similar solution to go for this product.

The main criteria while selecting a vendor is being a market leader who is number one in providing a solution for the problems/issues, which we are currently facing. That's the reason why we chose CA as they are market leaders for the product.

The product is good but there is some improvement required such as an automated way for creating those features which we are awaiting in the next release.

It helps us to create service scripts for performing shift-left in our testing.

In the development environment during the early lifecycle, whenever there is a third-party interface that is not available, we use this product to create those steps that help us in getting responses, as and when needed.

It has helped us to shift-left in our testing life cycle.

We do start testing at an early stage in the development environment, even before it gets into QA.

Generally, for our agile development projects, most of the third-party interfaces or interfacing applications which are shared services such as middleware services are not available. This is when we use CA Service Virtualization for early testing. Once we get into the QA environment, we test with real interfaces.

This product provides an interface with current test management tools and that’s what we like about it.

However, we would like to see more interfaces with all open source platforms, especially in the CI/CD framework such as Jenkins, TFS tools.

It is very stable. We've been using it for quite some time.

This product is very scalable.

I have not interacted directly with technical support. We have our own team that is in charge of this aspect.

Previously, we did use HP Service Test and SoapUI software, but we find this solution to be more scalable and stable.

I was not involved in the initial setup process, since we have a setup team that takes care of this.

Not many people know that even in the development space, developers can utilize this solution to perform some of their unit testing, before they get into real interfaces. This awareness is not there in the market. We use this product in performance and functional testing, so probably even in unit testing the developers could use it. Thus, we would strongly recommend to explore this tool and its functionalities.

The most important criteria while choosing a vendor is primarily its performance track record in the market and the range of solutions they provide across lifecycles. Another important aspect is the ability to interface with multiple solutions that are available in the market.

DevTest supports multiple testing environments so you can configure it to use one testing environment or 20, and you can change it for use in any other environments with the flick of a button.

It takes a bunch of different technologies and you can use it all in one solution, so I can work with my databases, my REST service calls, different web services; and I can use it all in one place. We do a lot of integration testing, and that takes care of it all.

I think the one thing that we need that it doesn't do is performance testing for UI applications. So it integrates with Selenium, but we can't use it for performance testing.

We'd like to be able to do performance testing for in-house applications with more than five to 10 users, but we can't do that with the tool.

There's a couple of things with the UI that make it a little bit hard for new people to use. It's not intuitive in some places. You have to know what you're doing. It's not something that somebody could pick up and just start using the same day without somebody explaining it a little bit.

It's been very stable. We haven't had any issues with it.

We're not using it. We are using it in a QA group, and so it's a pretty small adoption right now. We're trying to increase that.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward.

There was another one called Green Hat by IBM. We were looking at that. DevTest seemed to be a lot easier to use. Also, it worked with TIBCO and with other technologies that we were using.

Definitely read the documentation. The documentation is pretty good.

Service virtualization is the most valuable feature to me; it helped us to start the performance testing activities much earlier in the testing life cycle. It also reduces overall cost, as we can replace the expensive third-party services with virtual services.

• Helped us start performance testing much earlier in the STLC
• Shortens the performance testing period, as there is minimal component-level dependency
• Reduced cost per transaction in case of third-party virtualization
• Reduced schedule dependency, resulting in more productivity
• Enabled parallel development for the development team

It is difficult and requires a lot of manual effort to debug/troubleshoot any virtual service. The overall UI must improve and must be user friendly.

I have been using this solution for around 2.5 years.

We did not face any major issues related to deployment, stability or scalability.

The technical support was excellent. Other than that, through CA communities you can get answers to most of your queries or challenges.

The setup was straightforward and there are many supporting documents available on the CA site that guide you through the process.

It is a very good solution as it covers most of the transport and data protocols. The process of creating a virtual service is pretty straightforward and easy. The only drawback for this tool is its license cost.

Record and learn response patterns: It helps us to record traffic and learn automatically response patterns. This feature helps us to virtualize quickly and build an exact copy of the web services.

This product helps us to:

• Simulate broken/nonexistent systems
• Avoid latency between project
• Perform load bearing testing on unavailable external systems

More docs/code samples to develop custom steps: Sometimes we need to develop in web services custom behaviors that simulate technically and functionally the real service.

I have used it for two years.

Technical support is 9/10.

• Service virtualization (the virtual services created): Virtual service models are very well described and hence able to understand properly.
• Record and playback
• Creating VS from the DevTest console
• Magic string and data de-sensitization and model healing
• Reusing raw traffic files
• Wide range of protocol support, such as HL7 and many others

This product helps some of our customers achieve agility and delivery effectiveness.

The overall installation architecture should be simplified. There are so many components involved in the overall installation and the starting process. They should be made internal, such as:

• Enterprise Dashboard
• Registry
• Portal Broker
• VSE

Instead of all these being manual and optional, they should be compulsory, internal processes.

I have used it for four years.

I did not encounter any stability issues, as such.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 8 out of 10.

I previously used a different solution, just to explore it.

As a services organization, we need to have hands-on experience with different products, so that we can give different customers our point of view.

Initial setup was straightforward.

This is the first product in the line that we have used.

I always recommend this tool.

• Web service virtualization
• MQ virtualization

These two features helped us to build a virtual development environment for continuous testing and continuous development of our product.

The release cycle in our project was initially three weeks and we wasted time waiting for environment availability, because the dependent services were still under development. In Agile, we need to get the test environment up and ready before the code completion.

With the help of virtual services developed by CA DevTest/Service Virtualization, we were able to create the virtual environment.

Now, the release cycle is reduced to two weeks, with a fully developed virtual service environment.

We developed virtual services for the HTTP and MQ protocols.

Even though there is no comparison with its peers and all the necessary things are right in hand, there is room for improvement with the Virtualizing Mainframe components. The concept of agent installation is a tedious process and should have been much simpler.

I have used it for 5+ years and counting.

I have not yet encountered any stability issues. I mean, I don't think you will, if you have right configuration.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 8 of 10. The community forum is the best of its kind and we can find solutions to all general issues.

We previously used SoapUI Mocking; it is simple static virtual services. For dynamic behavior that takes less time to create (hardly two minutes), DevTest is the ultimate.

Installation and setup was very easy. It is easiest tool in the market to learn and implement.

Compared to the initial license cost of the product, the cost has been reduced a lot and it is competitive. Of course, iPhone does not match Nokia on price, as the price reflects the quality. Nonetheless, the price for this product is very competitive.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated SoapUI Pro, IBM Rational Test Virtualization Server/GreenHat and Parasoft SOAtest.

Just go with it, if you don’t have constraints regarding price; it is the best. Otherwise, for simple virtual services, go for SoapUi Pro. Rule out the others.