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In a world full of technological changes and disruption, speed to market is crucial for companies. Today, service virtualization is a buzzword because it enables QA and development teams faster and easy access to desirable test environments anywhere and anytime. Implementing service virtualization removes the need of setting the environment, enabling teams to deliver a quality product on time.
Service virtualization’s capability to shift left the testing process is widely acknowledged in the software testing industry. With a simulated test environment, you can eliminate constraints delaying the testing of crucial aspects, thereby ensuring early testing. It definitely yields significant benefits in the form of accelerating the time to market, reducing the risk, and curbing down the cost associated with setting up the testing environment.
So, What do you mean by ‘Shift Left’?
Shift left testing is nothing, but the integration of testing activities with development, commencing sooner in the SDLC, unlike the traditional testing methods. You simply move left to the left in the project lifecycle. The aim of service virtualization is to compress the defect curve and deliver quality products to the end-users.
Here are a few reasons why the shift left with service virtualization will create ripples and will bring about a landmark change in the testing and development procedure.
Reduction in the cost of Testing and Development
Bugs and errors are cheaper when caught young. The older they grow, the more and money they consume. When testing is done with every build, detecting errors is simple and the bugs found are smaller and easier to tackle. It eliminates the tremendous cost and unnecessary hard work to re-doing things again and again. According to a survey, companies implementing service virtualization have witnessed a 67% reduction in the overall cost.
Provides a Competitive Edge
‘Shift Left’ will give your team a competitive edge by speeding up the time to market. It rightfully accelerates the entire SDLC by increasing the speed of development without compromising on quality. Furthermore, service virtualization allows studying the behavior of connected components in a demo environment, instead of the live one, thereby saving a lot of time. With the rising competition rushing the product out of the door is key to entice the end-users.
Increased level of Automation
With ‘shift left’ you can easily increase the level of automation, which will reduce the potential human errors and increase the test coverage by running more test cases at the same time. Furthermore, it will curb the issues resulting due to issues during the production. It will increase the scope of automated testing because testers do not have to wait for the configuration.
Enhances Efficiency
Shift left with service virtualization enables monitoring the performance over time, focus on code quality check, frees up time for testers to focus on more challenging and rewarding tasks. Furthermore, with service virtualization, you can focus on built-in security checks.
Reduction in the burden developers
The virtual assets available allow the developers to test their own data set to use. It empowers the developers to perform a better and more comprehensive task before releasing the software to the test environment.
The biggest advantage of using service virtualization is the reduction in time to complete one test cycle – from five to six weeks to 2-3 days.
Future of service virtualization
With digital and instant gratification on a rise, the new mantra for IT companies is providing flexible and scalable solutions. In traditional testing, once the components were deployed, future testing was impossible. This was especially true for XML, HTML pages, and database components. Storing duplicate copies of the deployed components is a costly affair. Virtualization will help you overcome these roadblocks and will facilitate testing along with project management.
Shift left is more than a process change – it will bring a cultural shift in the testing methodologies.
