Enterprise Service Virtualisation
Date:
By: Daniel Howard
Classification: Market Update
Service virtualisation allows you to create virtual services that imitate the behavior of real services, but without any of the functionality. These can then be managed and maintained internally and used for testing purposes, intercepting requests to the real service and issuing appropriate, pre-recorded responses within your testing environment. Since they are internal rather than external, they are under your control, and you can make sure they are available for testing as and when you need them. Moreover, since they do not have any real functionality, they are very lightweight and are not prone to breakage. The end result is that by creating virtual copies of the services your application interacts with, you can test the application in isolation of any external services. This also means that any fault your tests find is almost certainly within the app itself, rather than a service. This report discusses the trends we see in the service virtualisation space as well as the vendors and products therein.